A new image of the Milky Way galaxy has been released; due to significant improvements in resolution, sensitivity, and amount of sky coverage, the new image “offers twice the resolution, ten times the sensitivity, and covers twice the area” compared to the previous survey completed in 2019, reported the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), on Oct. 29. Comparative photos are available on the site, comparing a visible light image to that of the new image.
“Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at Curtin University in Australia, took nearly 40,000 hours to compile the data from two surveys called the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM eXtended (GLEAM-X). The GLEAM and GLEAM-X surveys, conducted using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope, yielded abundant data over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014, and 113 nights from 2018 to 2020,” wrote [Live Science website](https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/unprecedented-radio-view-of-the-milky-way-took-over-40-000-hours-to-construct-space-photo-of-the-week this week.
This extensive survey is the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever created, and the lead astronomer on the ICRAR team, Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker also remarked that “No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy.”
A radio telescope can penetrate through stellar gas and dust, and a radio color image is a visual representation of data from these radio waves, which are invisible to the human eye. These images are created by assigning colors to different radio intensities to make them comprehensible and to highlight features that would otherwise be lost in shades of gray. The colors are “false colors” because they do not represent the actual radio wavelengths, but are chosen to reveal details in the data.
“Only the world’s largest radio telescope, the SKA Observatory’s SKA-Low telescope, set to be completed in the next decade on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia, will have the capacity to surpass this image in terms of sensitivity and resolution,” concluded Associate Professor Hurley-Walker, the principal investigator of the GLEAM-X survey.
The crisp image allows scientists to distinguish between different layers of old stars, exploded remnants of novae, and the birth of new stars. “It provides valuable insights into the evolution of stars, including their formation in various regions of the Galaxy, how they interact with other celestial objects, and ultimately their demise,” said Ms. Mantovanini.
We can’t really view the Milky Way in such a way, because Earth is on one of the outer areas of the spiral arms of the galaxy; when we look up at the dark sky, we’re looking back through the galactic plane edge on; the center is hidden from us due to dense clouds of gas and dust. You can find a possible viewing area internationally by looking up the designated “Dark Skies,” which have little or no interference from man-made light.
