The world-famous CSIRO telescope in Australia looked at the whole southern sky in record time and with amazing detail. It found 3 million galaxies that had never been seen before.
Australia’s national science organization, CSIRO, announced the achievement on December 1, and it quickly made headlines around the world for creating a new map of the universe.
The world-famous CSIRO telescope in Australia looked at the whole southern sky in record time and with amazing detail. It found 3 million galaxies that had never been seen before.
Australia’s national science organization, CSIRO, announced the achievement on December 1, and it quickly made headlines around the world for creating a new map of the universe.
Researchers say that astronomy may not have known about as many as 1 million of these faraway galaxies before, and this is likely just the beginning. Because this first study was so successful, CSIRO scientists are already making plans for more in-depth studies in the coming years.
Previous surveys of the whole sky with a telescope took years and tens of thousands of photos to finish.
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope is made up of 36 radio dish antennas spread out over 4,000 square meters in the Western Outback. These antennas work together to stitch together high-resolution images to make panoramic views of the universe.
CSIRO says that the final 903 photos used to make the new atlas have 70 billion pixels and 26 terabytes of data, which is more than your iPhone’s resolution. The “Galaxy” supercomputer at the Pawsey Supercomputing Center worked on this huge load, which started out as 13.5 “exabytes.”
Dr. Larry Marshall, the head of CSIRO, says that ASKAP is using the latest science and technology to answer old questions about the mysteries of the universe. This is giving astronomers all over the world new tools to solve their problems.
There are a lot of things to learn about 3 million new galaxies, so ASKAP is probably just getting started.
In a statement, lead author and CSIRO astronomer Dr. David McConnell said, “This census of the Universe will be used by astronomers around the world to explore the unknown and study everything from how stars form to how galaxies and their supermassive black holes change and interact.”
He went on to say that this new telescope and supercomputer could be used to find tens of millions of galaxies in the future.
This was taken from the website World At Large, which has news about nature, politics, science, health, and travel.