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The game-changing telescope takes panoramic images of deep space at record speed and opens the way to new discoveries.
A powerful new telescope in the Australian outback has mapped vast 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 studies of the sky have taken up to 10 years.
A photo 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]
“It’s really a game changer,” said astronomer David McConnell, who led the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) study of the southern sky at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
What makes this telescope unique is its wide field of view, using CSIRO-designed receivers, which allow you to take panoramic photos of the sky in more detail than before.
The telescope only needed to combine 903 images to map the sky, compared to other radio studies of the entire sky that require tens of thousands of images.
“It is more sensitive than previous polls that have covered the entire sky in this way, so we see more objects than we have seen in the past,” McConnell told Reuters news agency.
The ASKAP telescope, at the remote Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in the Western Australian desert, is comprised of 36 antennas, each 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)[DragonflyMedia/CSIRO/AFP)
Having a telescope that can study the sky in a few weeks or months means that the process can be repeated over and over again in a relatively short space of time, allowing astronomers to detect and track changes systematically.
“Even with this first pass that we have now, compared to previous images, we’ve already found some unusual objects,” McConnell said, including some unusual stars that suffer violent outbursts.
He said the data collected in this survey would allow astronomers to find out more about star formation and how galaxies and black holes evolve through statistical analysis.
Initial results were published Tuesday in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
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