A large telescope in the Australian outback has helped astronomers create an ‘atlas of the universe’ featuring a million previously undiscovered distant galaxies.
The team, from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), mapped about three million galaxies in just 300 hours.
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) broke records as it conducted its first survey of the entire southern sky – a process that has taken up to a decade using previous generations of telescopes.
The team have used the images to create a ‘Google Maps’ of the night sky that you can interact with and use to see details of far flung parts of the known universe.
What makes this telescope unique is its wide field of view, using receivers designed by CSIRO, which allow it to take panoramic pictures in sharper detail than before.
‘It’s really a game changer,’ said astronomer David McConnell, who led the CSIRO study of the southern sky at the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory.
The telescope only needed to combine 903 images to map the entire southern sky, compared with other all-sky radio surveys that require tens of thousands of images.
[Interesting Read]
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