Mega-telescope in Australia is creating a ‘Google map’ of the Universe: All you need to know

Team Udayavani, Dec 5, 2020, 1:01 PM IST

A telescope in the Australian outback has discovered over a million new galaxies and helped to create an ‘atlas of the universe’.The Aussie super-‘scope captured images of around three million galaxies in just over 12 days.

This allowed scientists to create a virtual map of the night sky that lets you interact with distant parts of the universe.

The initial results of this survey were published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia on November 30.

According to Indian Express, ASKAP is a telescope designed over a decade ago and located about 800 km north of Perth. It became fully operational in February 2019 and is currently conducting pilot surveys of the sky before it can begin large-scale projects from 2021 onward.

ASKAP surveys are designed to map the structure and evolution of the Universe, which it does by observing galaxies and the hydrogen gas that they contain.

The telescope uses novel technology developed by CSIRO, which is a kind of a “radio camera” to achieve high survey speeds and consists of 36 dish antennas, which are each 12m in diameter.

The telescope has an enormous field of view, so it only needed to combine 903 images to create a sky map.