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The game-changing telescope is taking panoramic images of deep space at record speed and paving the way for new discoveries.
A powerful new telescope in the Australian hinterland has mapped large areas of the universe in record time, revealing a million new galaxies and paving the way for new discoveries, the country’s national science agency said on Tuesday. .
The radio telescope, dubbed the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), was able to map around three million galaxies in just 300 hours. Comparable sky studies lasted up to 10 years.
A photo made available on October 5, 2012 shows an aerial view of part of the ASKAP antennas at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in eastern Australia [EPA]
“This is a real game-changer,” said astronomer David McConnell, who led the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) study of the southern skies at Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
What makes this telescope unique is its wide field of view, using receivers designed by CSIRO, which allow it to take panoramic photos of the sky with greater precision than before.
The telescope only needed to combine 903 images to map the sky, compared to other whole-sky radio surveys that require tens of thousands of images.
“It’s more sensitive than previous polls that covered the whole sky like this one, so we’re seeing more objects than we’ve seen in the past,” McConnell told Reuters news agency.
The ASKAP telescope, located at the remote radio astronomy observatory at Murchison, in the Western Australian desert, consists of 36 antennas each 12 meters in diameter[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)
Having a telescope capable of surveying the sky in a matter of weeks or months means that the process can be repeated over and over again in a relatively short period of time, allowing astronomers to spot and track changes consistently.
“Even with this first pass that we are having right now, compared to previous images, we have already found some unusual objects,” McConnell said, including some unusual stars that are exploding violently.
He said the data collected as part of the investigation would allow astronomers to learn more about star formation and the evolution of galaxies and black holes through statistical analysis.
The first results were published Tuesday in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
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