New map of the night sky reveals 4.4 million galaxies and other space objects

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About 4.4 million space objects in billions of light years Far away drawn by astronomers, Including a million previously unobserved space objects.

The vast majority of these objects are galaxies containing massive black holes or new, rapidly growing stars. Other discoveries include the collision of groups of distant galaxies and glowing stars, which vary in brightness, within the Milky Way, according to a news release from Durham University in England.

The observations were made by analyzing a huge amount of data from the sensitive Low Frequency Array telescope, known as LOFAR, which uses low radio frequencies to observe and classify about a quarter of the northern hemisphere’s sky in fine detail. It is operated by ASTRON, the Dutch Institute for Radio Astronomy.

This data set is the second LOFAR sky survey to be announced and covers an area 13 times first editionwhich has recorded radio signals from nearly 300,000 galaxies and other space objects.

Radio astronomy is another way to reveal the secrets of the universe, especially things that cannot be seen with visible light waves, such as black holes.

“Every time we create a map our screens are filled with new discoveries and things that have not been seen by human eyes before. Astronomer Timothy Shimwell said: participating scientist in ASTRON and Leiden University, in a statement.

This data version Only 27% of the entire survey, Schmuel said.

“We expect this to lead to many scientific breakthroughs in the future, including studying how the largest structures in the universe grow, how black holes form and evolve, the physics that govern star formation in distant galaxies, and even the details of the most fascinating stages in the lives of stars in our galaxy. “.

To map space objects, scientists used algorithms on high-performance computers across Europe to process 3,500 hours of observations. This feat of data processing required the computing power of nearly 20,000 laptop computers.