- A radio satellite survey has detected the remnants of two .
- Found in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the scientists hope the discovery is just the beginning for their survey over the next five years.
- Based in Australia, their telescope imitates a bug’s eye to get a deeper view of the universe.
Studying a nearby galaxy known as the (SMC), scientists from the University of Manchester found something haunting: remnants of two possible supernovas, the cloud of gas and dust left over after a star explodes. If everything checks out, the supernovas are completely new to astronomy.
Everything in space is far away from Earth, but in the great scope of things, the SMC is actually to our planet. It’s a mere 200,000 light-years away from the Milky Way, which means that on clear nights, it can even be seen faintly with the naked eye on Earth’s southern hemisphere. Beyond the supernovas, the team also discovered the radio signals of 20 planetary nebulae that previously only had optical observations.
“This is an exciting time for the study of nearby galaxies. These nearby external galaxies offer an ideal laboratory, since they are close enough to be resolved, yet located at relatively well-known distances,” the scientists their paper, recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The scientists discovered the supernova remnants through Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) pilot survey project, which is making a a census of radio sources in the sky.
“The reason for doing this is to try to understand how the stars and galaxies were first formed, and how they evolved to their present state, where planets and people are formed. The idea of doing this census is so that we can catch galaxies in all their different stages of evolution, and try to place them in sequence, and so study how their properties change as they evolve,” says the .
The team used the new Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope developed by CSIRO, Australia’s federal science agency. Based in the Western Australian region of Murchison, the ASKAP consists of 36 dish antennas working together, and its phased array feed receivers allow it to look in several directions at the same time, “like an insect’s compound eye,” according to .
All of that leads to more precise studying of the cosmos.
“We can now combine this radio data with observations from optical, X-ray, gamma-ray and infrared telescopes, allowing us to explore the SMC and other galaxies in unprecedented detail,” says Tana Joseph, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, in the .
The observations were taken at two different radio frequencies, 960 MHz and 1320 MHz, allowing for a sensitivity more than four times that of previous surveys of the SMC. And in the future, the ASKAP EMU project hopes to detect 70 million galaxies within five years. That’s a lot of galaxies.
