Australia’s national science organization, CSIRO, used the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope to look at the entire southern sky in record time and with amazing detail. The telescope discovered three million galaxies that had never been seen before, with researchers saying that astronomy may not have known about as many as one million of these galaxies. The final 903 photos used to make the new atlas have 70 billion pixels and 26 terabytes of data. This first study was so successful that CSIRO scientists are already making plans for more in-depth studies in the coming years.
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.