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Astronomers in Australia have just mapped 83% of the observable universe in just 300 hours.
This new sky survey, which the Australian National Science Agency (CSIRO) described in a statement as a “Google map of the universe,” marks the completion of a major test for Australia’s Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, a network of 36 antennas rooted in the remote Outback of Western Australia. While astronomers used ASKAP to scour the sky for radio signatures (including the mysterious fast radio bursts) since 2012, the telescope’s full range of antennas have never been used in a single sky survey, until now.
Harnessing the full potential of the telescope, researchers have mapped about 3 million galaxies in the southern sky, according to an article published Nov.30 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Up to 1 million of these distant galaxies may be previously unknown to astronomy, the researchers wrote, and that’s probably just the beginning. With the success of this first survey, CSIRO scientists are already planning even deeper observations in the coming years.
Related: Scientists unveil largest 3D map of the universe ever
“For the first time, ASKAP flexed all its muscles, building a map of the universe in more detail than ever and at record speed,” study lead author David McConnell, astronomer at CSIRO, he said in a statement. “We expect to find tens of millions of new galaxies in future investigations.”
Many all-sky surveys can take months, even years, to complete. The new effort from CSIRO, which they labeled the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey, took only a few weeks of stargazing. While each of the telescope’s 36 receivers took vast panoramic images of the sky, a dedicated network of supercomputers worked twice as hard to combine them. The resulting map, which covers 83% of the sky, is a combination of 903 individual images, each containing 70 billion pixels. (For comparison, the highest definition cameras on sale shoot a few hundred million pixels per image.)
Each of these images will be made available to the public through the CSIRO data access portal, as scientists analyze the results and plan their next sky map adventures.
Originally published in Live Science.
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