[ad_1]
The “revolutionary” telescope acquires panoramic images of deep space at record speeds and paves the way for new discoveries.
A powerful new telescope in the Australian outback has mapped large areas of the universe in record time, revealing a million new galaxies and paving the way for new discoveries, the country’s national science agency said Tuesday.
The radio telescope, dubbed Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), was able to map around three million galaxies in just 300 hours. Comparable surveys of the sky took up to 10 years.
A photo made available on 5 October 2012 shows an aerial view of part of the ASKAP antennas at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in Eastern Australia [EPA]
“It’s really a game changer,” said astronomer David McConnell, who led the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) study of the southern sky at the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
What makes this telescope unique is its wide field of view, thanks to the receivers designed by CSIRO, which allow it to take panoramic photos of the sky in sharper detail than before.
The telescope only needed to combine 903 images to map the sky, compared to other all-sky radio surveys that require tens of thousands of images.
“It’s more sensitive than previous polls that have covered the entire sky in this way, so we see more objects than we’ve seen in the past,” McConnell told Reuters news agency.
The ASKAP telescope, at the remote Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in the Western Australian desert, consists of 36 antennas, each 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter [Dragonfly Media/CSIRO/AFP)
Having a telescope that can survey the sky in a few weeks or months means the process can be repeated again and again in a relatively short space of time, allowing astronomers to systematically spot and track changes.
“Even with this first pass we’ve got right now, compared with previous images, we’ve already found some unusual objects,” McConnell said, including some unusual stars that undergo violent outbursts.
He said data gathered in this survey would allow astronomers to find out more about star formation and how galaxies and black holes evolve through statistical analyses.
The initial results were published on Tuesday in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
.
[ad_2]
Source link
