:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/metroworldnews/TUCLCTHQE5HGZKRWP3WHFCHCIE.jpg "The Milky Way as we have never seen it before: a whole work of art captured by Australian radio telescopes")
The Milky Way It is the galaxy where our Solar System is located. From Earth it looks like a wonderful formation of stars, but thanks to two radio telescopes it is possible to observe it like we’ve never done before.
The two largest radio telescopes in Australia, the ASKAP and the Parkes, operated by the country’s scientific agency, CSIRO, managed to observe a picture of supernova remnants, marking the places of birth and death of a group of stars.
In it, the map of the PEGASUS project is combined with the observations of EMU and POSSUM.
Andrew Hopkins, Principal scientist at Macquarie University’s EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) Project explains the details.
“This new image shows a region of the Milky Way, only visible to radio telescopes, where we can see extended emission associated with the hydrogen gas that fills the space between the dying stars.” indicates the teacher.
It’s related “with the birth of new stars and hot bubbles of gas called supernovae. More than twenty new possible supernova remnants have been discovered as a result of combining these images, where only seven were previously known.”
Examining the Milky Way and giving more answers to the cosmos, the objective of scientists
This is just one part of what both the EMU project and the PEGASUS survey are trying to achieve: learning more about our cosmos. PEGASUS will complete its pilot observations by observing the entire southern sky, using the Parkes telescope over the next two years.
Hopkins worked with Brianna Ball (University of Alberta, Canada) and Roland Kothes (National Research Council of Canada).
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/metroworldnews/P2MKBK3IZJABFPRQ26V4KYQ6AI.jpg "The Milky Way as we have never seen it before: a whole work of art captured by Australian radio telescopes")
Thanks to this new capture, Hopkins says, astronomers will be able to further their understanding of the galaxy and beyond by making future observations.
“It is estimated that there may be around 1,500 more supernova remnants in the galaxy that astronomers have not yet discovered. Finding the missing remains will help us better understand our galaxy and its history.” notes Professor Hopkins.
