An international team of scientists led by the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) has presented REGALADE, an unprecedented catalogue covering the entire sky and bringing together nearly eighty million galaxies. The work, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics , marks a turning point for astronomy and opens up a new scenario that allows researchers to explore cosmic events with a degree of precision never before achieved.
The study was led by Hugo Tranin, a researcher at ICCUB, and included the participation of ICCUB-IEEC researchers Nadejda Blagorodnova, Marco Antonio Gómez Muñoz and Maxime Wavasseur. The study combines expertise in time-domain astrophysics, binary star evolution, large astrophysical catalogues and multi-messenger astronomy, with the aim of developing comprehensive resources that enable the scientific exploitation of the new generation of time-based cartographies with observations from both the ground and space.
A catalogue with precise distances and measurements
When a telescope detects a sudden phenomenon, such as a supernova or the merger of two black holes or neutron stars, astronomers need to know where to look and how far away the event occurred. This requires identifying the galaxy where the event takes place. To date, catalogues were incomplete beyond about 300 million light-years, leaving large gaps in the map of the nearby universe.
REGALADE fills these gaps by combining data from large surveys and cleaning them using data from the Gaia mission to remove stars mistakenly classified as galaxies. The result is a catalogue of high purity and integrity that includes precise distance and size measurements for all galaxies, and stellar masses for most of them.
