Home » , » Outback Telescope Captures ‘Golden’ View of Milky Way’s Center

Outback Telescope Captures ‘Golden’ View of Milky Way’s Center

No comments
A "golden" view of the Milky Way was captured by the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia. (Photo Credit: Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker - ICRAR / Curtin - and the GLEAM Team.)

A radio telescope located in the Western Australian outback recently snapped a gorgeous, “golden” view of the Milky Way galaxy.

The image, which was captured by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, demonstrates what the Milky Way would look like if we could see human waves, according to an International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) press release. Astrophysicist Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker created the images using the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Australia.

“This new view captures low-frequency radio emission from our galaxy, looking both in fine detail and at larger structures,” Dr. Hurley-Walker explained. “Our images are looking directly at the middle of the Milky Way, towards a region astronomers call the Galactic Centre.”

Data for the Milky Way research comes from GLEAM, also known as the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA survey. It has a resolution of two arcminutes (roughly the same as the human eye), and maps the sky with radio waves at frequencies between 72 and 231 MHz.

“It’s the power of this wide frequency range that makes it possible for us to disentangle different overlapping objects as we look toward the complexity of the Galactic Centre,” Hurley-Walker added. “Essentially, different objects have different ‘radio colors’, so we can use them to work out what kind of physics is at play.”

This 28-image photomosaic shows the arch of the Milky Way over a spot in Western Australia. (Photo Credit: Paean Ng / Astrordinary Imaging)

With the images, Hurley-Walker and her colleagues detected the remnants of 27 giant stars that exploded in supernovae at the end of their lives, according to ICRAR. The MWA can scout out which supernova remnants are older, further away, or in very empty environments.

Hurley-Walker pointed out that one of the newly-discovered supernova remnants is in an empty region of space that’s way out of the plane of the Milky Way. It’s the last bits of a star that perished less than 9,000 years ago, and the explosion could have been seen by Indigenous people across Australia.

Two of the supernova remnants found are strange “orphans,” according to Hurley-Walker. They’re located in a region of the sky where there aren’t any large stars. Other supernova remnants noted in the research are also very old in age.

Even though the MWA is great for spotting supernova remnants, it’s really limited in sensitivity and resolution. However, the low-frequency part of the SKA, which will be constructed at MWA’s site, could pick up many more supernova remnants that formed in the last 100,000 years or may be on the other side of our galaxy.

New images of the Galactic Centre can be viewed using the GLEAMoscope app or with an android device via the GLEAM app.

More on Geek.com:



from Geek.com https://ift.tt/2D3ZFXa
via IFTTT

0 comments:

Post a Comment