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Melbourne: A powerful new telescope in the Australian outback has mapped large swaths of the universe in record time, revealing a million new galaxies and paving the way for new discoveries, says the country’s national science agency.
The radio telescope, dubbed Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), was able to map around 3 million galaxies in just 300 hours. Comparable surveys of the sky took up to 10 years.
“It’s a turning point,” 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, using CSIRO-designed receivers, 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 investigations that have covered the entire sky in this way, so we see more objects than we’ve seen in the past,” McConnell said.
Having a telescope that can detect the sky in a few weeks or months means that the process can be repeated over and over again in a short amount of time, allowing astronomers to systematically locate and track changes.
“Even with this first pass that we have right now, compared to the previous images, we have already found some unusual objects,” McConnell said, including unusual stars experiencing violent explosions.
He said the data collected in this survey would allow astronomers to learn more about star formation and how galaxies and black holes evolve through statistical analysis.
The first results were published Tuesday in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
Reuters
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