Radio Telescope Reveals Thousands of Star-Forming Galaxies

The LOFAR telescope detects stars born in tens of thousands of distant galaxies.

REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – Europe’s LOFAR radio telescope has detected stars born in the tens of thousands galaxy in the distance. Using techniques suited to the exposure and with a field of view about 300 times the size of the Full Moon, scientists can see galaxies like the Milky Way, far away. universe in the past.

“The light from these galaxies has traveled for billions of years to reach Earth. This means that we can see galaxies like billions of years ago, when they formed most of their stars, “said Philip Best, who led the telescope study from Britain’s University of Edinburgh. Phys, Thursday (8/4).

The LOFAR telescope combines signals from a large network of more than 70,000 individual antennas in a number of countries from Ireland to Poland. The signal is linked from a high-speed fiber optic network.

In addition, the LOFAR telescope is capable of observing very faint, low energy light that is invisible to the human eye. This light is usually created by ultra-energetic particles moving close to the speed of light.

The researchers say this allows them to study supernova stellar explosions, colliding galaxy clusters and active black holes, which accelerate these particles in shocks or jets. By observing the same area of ​​the sky over and over and gathering data to create a single exposure image, the study team was able to detect radio light emission from exploding stars.

The most distant objects detected came from when the universe was only one billion years old. Now he is about 13.8 billion years old.

“When galaxies form stars, many explode at the same time and accelerate high-energy particles until the galaxies start to radiate,” explained Cyril Tasse, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and one of the study’s authors.

The LOFAR telescope focuses on a vast expanse of the Earth’s northern part of the sky, with an exposure time equivalent to 10 times longer than that used in the creation of the first cosmic map in 2019. Tasse says it gives much smoother results, such as photos taken in the dark. , where the longer the exposure, the more things you can tell the difference.

The inner image is generated by combining the signals from thousands of telescope antennas, combining more than four petabytes of raw data, the equivalent of about one million DVDs. The study results are published in a series of papers in journals Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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