Three million galaxies mapped – in 300 hours?

A powerful telescope hit the astronomy scene in Australia, mapping vast swathes of the universe in record time, uncovering a million new galaxies and paving the way for new universe mysteries, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

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The Australian radio telescope stuns the world, maps millions of distant galaxies

Called the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), the telescope effectively mapped around three million galaxies in just 300 hours. It took up to 10 years to complete similar surveys of the night sky.

“It’s really a game changer,” said David McConnell, an astronomer who led the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) to study the southern sky over Western Australia at the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory.

More sensitive radio telescope survey than the previous ones

The singular importance of this telescope is its incredibly wide field of view: it uses CSIRO-designed receivers, which allow it to take panoramic images of the sky in sharper detail than ever before.

The Australia-based array of telescopes was to merge 903 images to map the sky. Comparatively, other all-sky radio polls require tens of thousands of images to make it happen.

“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 told Reuters.

The “First Pass” survey has already acquired “unusual objects”

An array of telescopes poised to detect the sky in weeks or months instead of decades means that the process can repeat itself over and over again in incredibly short snippets of time, allowing astronomers to systematically locate and track changes on human rather than cosmic time scales. .

“Even with this first pass that we have right now, compared to the previous images, we have already found some unusual objects,” said McConnell, including a collection of stars known to experience “violent explosions”. Al Jazeera relationships.

New data will help astronomers understand how black holes and galaxies evolve

McConnell said the data just gathered from this survey would allow astronomers to better understand how stars form and how black holes and the galaxies around them evolve, using statistical analysis.

Almost everyone knows that the universe is vast, which means there is no shortage of cosmic space to explore. The Australian ASKAP array has added orders of magnitude to the rhythm of galaxy mapping – a task for which array size really matters.