How the mighty Aus telescope is giving us a new snapshot of the universe

Astronomers from Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), have accomplished a feat that no one else has done before. Using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, located about 800km north of Perth, Western Australia, they were able to map around three million galaxies in just 300 hours. About one million of these were previously unknown to humans.

The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) scanned approximately 83% of the sky in record time to comfortably produce one of the most detailed sky surveys ever undertaken using radio waves. Preliminary results were published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

The survey collected a staggering 13.5 exabytes of raw data. A single exabyte is equivalent to one billion gigabytes. The ASKAP array of telescopes, consisting of 36 parabolic antennas, each with a diameter of 12 meters and spread over a baseline of 6 km, was able to capture and fuse 903 images to map the southern sky.

To achieve this, radio investigations in the past have required tens of thousands of images. Each image ASKAP captured reportedly contained 70 billion pixels. To put this into perspective, the highest definition cameras available for commercial consumption shoot images with a few hundred million pixels per image.

As a result, the telescope’s powerful design was able to form incredibly vast panoramic images of the sky with a network of supercomputers working overtime to combine them. The images will reportedly be made available via CSIRO’s data access portal, allowing scientists to analyze them and track further mapping projects.

Such a sophisticated array of telescopes will allow astronomers to dramatically transform the time scales involved in surveying the sky. What usually takes decades can now be accomplished in hours and days. It has the ability to profoundly influence the pace at which we learn how stars are created, how black holes are formed, and how galaxies move and evolve around them.

And as far as CSIRO scientists are concerned, this is just the beginning. The ASKAP – already one of the world’s leading radio telescopes – is actually only part of an international effort to build the largest radio telescope ever built: the Square Kilometer Array project. The SKA will eventually see millions of low-frequency antennas working together as a single virtual dish capable of detecting an area of ​​one square kilometer (or one million square meters).

ASKAP’s 36 antennas acquired operational capability in February 2019 and are currently conducting pilot surveys. Large-scale projects are expected to begin in 2021. “We expect to find tens of millions of new galaxies in future investigations,” said CSIRO astronomer and lead author of the survey, Dr David McConnell.