Astronomers just created a massively detailed Milky Way map with 3.3. billion stars - Salon

That's because astronomers have recently released a new and more detailed catalog of the Milky Way, called DECaPS2, which includes 3.32 billion celestial objects.

Assembling the catalog was an enormous and almost unthinkable undertaking, but thanks to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) — which is located at an altitude of 2,200 meters atop Cerro Tololo in Chile — the observatory's unique vantage point gave astronomers an opportunity to capture data from the southern hemisphere in great detail.

"One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other," said Andrew Saydjari, graduate student at Harvard University, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, in a statement.

While this spiral makes for iconic photographs of our galaxy, it's more difficult to observe the Galactic plane and parse out the enormous number of stars.

"When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way's disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars," said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper said in a statement.

"I hope people understand just how much information about our galaxy is out there if we apply careful and rigorous statistical analyses," Saydjari said.