Largest 2D Universe Map Released

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team released the largest two-dimensional color map of the universe ever created, containing 5.6 trillion pixels and nearly 4 billion celestial objects. The map covers about 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light and is publicly available through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. It was assembled from 263,407 telescope exposures collected over 2,285 nights, involving more than 160 scientists in data collection and a team of 20 in final assembly. The map combines observations from three ground-based surveys using telescopes in Chile and Arizona, supplemented by infrared data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Processing required about a year of software development and eight weeks on the Perlmutter supercomputer at the United States — National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. The map serves as the foundation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, which completed its original five-year program in April 2026 and has mapped over 47 million galaxies and quasars. Early DESI results suggest dark energy may be weakening over time, with more complete results expected in 2027. The map will support future observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Roman, and will be used to train artificial intelligence systems for astronomical data analysis. Previous versions of the Legacy Surveys have contributed to over 1,800 scientific papers.