The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) has completed its first survey of the entire southern sky, creating what the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has labelled as a new atlas of the Universe.
The ASKAP mapped approximately 3 million galaxies in just 300 hours. The 13.5 exabytes of raw data generated by ASKAP was processed using hardware and software custom-built by CSIRO.
"The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey is like a Google map of the Universe where most of the millions of star-like points on the map are distant galaxies -- about a million of which we've never seen before," CSIRO said in a statement.
The ASKAP, developed and operated by CSIRO, is a new type of radio telescope that makes images of radio signals from the sky to allow astronomers to view the Universe at wavelengths that the human eye cannot see.
It forms part of the $1 billion Square Kilometre Array[1] (SKA), which is slated as the largest and most capable radio telescope ever constructed[2].
The ASKAP and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope are located at the CSIRO owned and operated Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) on Wajarri Yamaji land in remote Western Australia.
Processing of the data collected by both the MWA and ASKAP telescopes was performed by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre's real-time supercomputing system dedicated to radio astronomy, Galaxy.
Using ASKAP at the MRO, the survey team observed 83% of the entire sky. With ASKAP's advanced receivers, the team only needed to combine 903 images to form the full map of the sky, significantly less than the tens of thousands of images needed for earlier all-sky radio surveys conducted by major world telescopes.
"For the first