AsianScientist (Nov. 4, 2016) – A telescope located deep in the West Australian outback has shown researchers what the Universe would look like if human eyes could see radio waves. A corresponding study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA, or GLEAM survey, has produced a catalog of 300,000 galaxies observed by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a radio telescope located at a remote site northeast of Geraldton. Lead author Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker from Curtin University and the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research said this is the first radio survey to image the sky in such amazing technicolor.
“The human eye sees by comparing brightness in three different primary colors: red, green and blue. GLEAM does rather better than that, viewing the sky in 20 primary colors,” Hurley-Walker said. “That’s much better than we humans can manage, and it even beats the very best in the animal kingdom, the mantis shrimp, which can see 12 different primary colors.”
GLEAM is a large-scale, high-resolution survey of the radio sky observed at frequencies from 70 to 230 MHz, observing radio waves that have been travelling through space—some for billions of years. Hurley-Walker’s team is using this survey to find out what happens when clusters of galaxies collide, and will also be able to see the remnants of explosions from the most ancient stars in our galaxy to find the first and last gasps of supermassive black holes.
MWA Director Associate Professor Randall Wayth said GLEAM is one of the biggest radio surveys of the sky ever assembled. Completing the GLEAM survey with the MWA is a big step on the path to the low frequency part of the international Square Kilometer Array radio telescope to be built in Australia in the coming years, he said.
The article can be found at: Hurley-Walker et al. (2016) Galactic and Extragalactic All-sky Murchison Widefield Array (GLEAM) Survey I: A Low-Frequency Extragalactic Catalog.
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Source: International Center for Radio Astronomy Research; Photo: ICRAR/Curtin University.
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