A MEGA-TELESCOPE has helped create a “Google Maps of the Universe” – uncovering more than a million previously unknown galaxies.
The Aussie super-‘scope captured images of around three million galaxies in just over 12 days.
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This allowed scientists to create a virtual map of the night sky that lets you interact with distant parts of the universe.
Mapping sections of space can take years, or even decades.
But the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, managed to capture the entire southern sky in around 300 hours of telescope time.
“For the first time ASKAP has flexed its full muscles, building a map of the Universe in greater detail than ever before, and at record speed,” said Dr David McConnell, lead author of the project.
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“We expect to find tens of millions of new galaxies in future surveys,” added Dr McConnell, who works as an astronomer at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.
The telescope has an enormous field of view, so it only needed to combine 903 images to create a sky map.
Normally mapping a section of sky this large would need tens of thousands of images.
Importantly, images taken for the sky survey are around five times more sensitive than more – and provided twice the level of detailed compared to rival surveys.
A staggering 13.5 exabytes of raw data were generated – or around 13.5billion gigabytes.
The plan is to now conduct even more sensitive sky surveys using different wavelength bands.
“ASKAP is applying the very latest in science and technology to age-old questions about the mysteries of the Universe,” said Dr Larry Marshall, who heads up CSIRO.
“And equipping astronomers around the world with new breakthroughs to solve their challenges.
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What is a Galaxy?
Here’s what you need to know…
- A galaxy is a massive collection of space matter, bound by gravity
- Inside a gravity you’ll find stars and their remains, gas, dust, dark matter, planets and black holes
- The word comes from the Greek galaxias, which means “milky”
- It’s a reference to the colour of our own galaxy, the Milky Way
- Smaller galaxies have just a few hundred million stars, while the biggest can have a hundred trillion stars
- Galaxies can take on many different shapes, including elliptical, spiral or irregular
- And most galaxies are thought to have supermassive black holes at the centre
- In the Milky Way, the central black hole is called Sagittarius A* – and has four-million times the mass of our own Sun
- The number of galaxies in the observable universe is believed to number in the trillions
- The Milky Way measures around 100,000 lightyears across
- And its nearest neighbour Andromeda is roughly 2.5million lightyears away
- The formation of galaxies is believed to have begun around 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when early matter combined into larger structures that eventually became the galaxies we see today
He added that ASKAP generates more raw data at a faster rate than Australia’s entire internet traffic.
This “census of the Universe” will now be used by astronomers around the world.
It’s expected to help answer questions around star formation, and how galaxies and their supermassive black holes evolve and interact.
You can try a simplified galaxy map here at CSIRO – click here.
Details of the Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) were featured in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
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