The world’s largest filled single-dish radio telescope launched at the weekend, and it relies on a piece of West Australian innovation. The 500-metre-wide telescope — known as FAST — uses a data system developed at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy in Perth and the European Southern Observatory to manage the huge amounts of data it generates.
A prototype part of the software system to manage data from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope has run on the world’s second-fastest supercomputer in China. The SKA is arguably the world’s largest science project, with the low-frequency part of the telescope alone set to have more than a quarter of a million antennas facing the sky.
Two volunteer participants in an international citizen science project, T. Matorney and I. A. Terentev, have had a rare galaxy cluster that they found named after them. The pair pieced together the huge C-shaped structure of RGZ-CL J0823.2+0333 from much smaller images of cosmic radio waves shown to them as part of the web-based program Radio Galaxy Zoo.
Astronomers have discovered a spectacular tail of gas more than 300,000 light-years across coming from a galaxy known as NGC 4569, 55 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster. The plume is made up of hydrogen gas — the material new stars are made of — and is five times longer than the galaxy itself.
An international team of scientists used the 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope equipped with an innovative receiver to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way, into a previously unexplored region of space. Hundreds of hidden nearby galaxies have therefore been studied for the first time, shedding light on a mysterious gravitational anomaly dubbed the Great Attractor.
An international team of astronomers studying more than 200,000 galaxies has made the most comprehensive assessment of the energy output of the nearby universe. The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) project confirms that the energy produced is only about half what it was two billion years ago and this fading is occurring across all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the far infrared. The universe is slowly dying.
A team of scientists in Australia and the Netherlands has discovered powerful jets blasting out of a star system known as PSR J1023+0038 that consists of a super-dense neutron star in a close orbit with another, more normal star. It was previously thought that the only objects in the universe capable of forming such powerful jets were black holes.
Research using powerful computer simulations to study galaxies that have fallen into the Coma Cluster, one of the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the universe roughly 300 million light-years from Earth, suggests that it could contain as much as 100 times more dark matter than visible matter, according to an Australian study.
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