The largest 2D map of the Universe has been released. 5.6 trillion pixels and you can explore from your computer

Astronomers have released the largest 2D map of the Universe this week, with 5.6 trillion pixel and almost 4 billion celestial object and maps about three-quarters of the sky.

It contains nebulae, black holes, asteroids, and of course, lots and lots of galaxies. It builds on previous DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys which in themselves have become standards for referencing the known Universe.

The NSF Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile which contributed data to the survey

“It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” says David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you're working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” 

There's an online viewer where you explore the data here. (Warning though, it is addictive and I'm probably already spent too much time cruising around the night sky with it....)

Read more here

Venus reaches greatest elongation for 2026. A great time to see it!

Greatest elongation is when an inferior planet, one closer to the Sun than the Earth, ie Mercury or Venus, appears furthest apart from the Sun,

For Venus, this happens at 4.00pm Sydney on the 15th August 2026. (August 15, 2026, at 06:00 UTC).  

As Venus appears at its longest distance from the Sun in the sky, it will be visible for quite a while in the early evening and appear high in the sky. After the Moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky and is certainly putting on a display at the moment as it shines at about magnitude -4.4.  

Venus and a very thin crescent Moon at around 6.30pm, Saturday 15th August 2026 as seen in the westerly sky from Sydney. Image via Stellarium. 

Here's a map that shows where to see Venus in the next few nights, although it will be very hard to miss! You can enjoy the planet with just your eyes as a bright "star" and even a small telescope will reveal it as about half phase. 

What's a Black Hole Star? Say G'day to MoM-BH*-1

It's not often scientists announce an entirely new type of astronomical object, but that's what happened this week with what's been labelled a Black Hole Star. (Not to be confused with the Soundgarden song "Black Hole Sun"...)

Along the way, it might just have help solve a recent cosmic mystery.

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began observations, it started finding what have been called "Little Red Dots." These are were announced in March 2022 and had astronomers scratching their heads as to what they were. They appeared in large numbers and dated back to some 600 million to 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. What these compact, luminous, red sources of light were in the early Universe, and their nature remains under active investigation.

MoM-BH*-1 was the brightest object of this type spotted during the Mirage or Miracle (MoM) survey by Webb. Its red colour was made even redder by the expansion of the Universe, but its colour would normally suggest something surrounded by a cloud of dust, however its appearance suggested there wasn't much there.  It's surprisingly bright, with the exception of a wavelength where a sharp change in brightness occurs. This is called a Balmer break, often a sign of dense gas absorbing light from a star forming without much dust around it. 

As a further head scratcher,  MoM-BH*-1’s Balmer break was stronger than ever observed with a star. It's way too bright to have been generated by the nuclear fusion process, which powers stars such as our Sun.

“It is a very special thing to find an object with no comparison, given the vast stores of data on billions of stars, galaxies and black holes that we have in our archival databases,” study co-author Rohan Naidu, said study co-author Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawaiʻi., “MoM-BH*-1 is one in a billion!”

Computer simulations by Naidu and his team point towards a strange hybrid object, which is a combination of a central black hole some 50 millions times the mass of the Sun surrounded by a cloud of gas about the size of the Solar System. The brightness of these little red dots is so bright it outshines its host, early galaxy in a range of wavelengths.

MoM-BH*-1 as seen by the JWST image via the researchers

The odd little red dot “shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars,” said Naidu.

There will be further studies of other little red dots especially about early galaxy and black hole formation, but it looks we can add Black Hole Stars to the growing list of astronomical objects that have been discovered. 

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

15th August 2026