Gleam team lights up the night sky

271016 gleamsurvey 1
Radio image by Natasha Hurley-Walker (ICRAR / Curtin) and the GLEAM Team. MWA tile and landscape by Dr John Goldsmith / Celestial Visions

A telescope located deep in the West Australian outback has shows what the universe would look like if human eyes could see radio waves.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a band across the sky and the dots beyond are some of the 300,000 galaxies observed by the telescope for the GLEAM survey by the Murchison Widefield Array – a tile of which is seen in the image above.

As for the radio waves, red indicates the lowest frequencies, green the middle frequencies and blue the highest frequencies. 

The catalogue was reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Please login to favourite this article.