EMU is an incredibly ambitious project with scientific goals that range from understanding star and galaxy evolution to cosmological measurements of dark matter and dark energy, and much more

Astronomers using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope have observed the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light-years away, at 888 MHz as part of the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) survey.

“It’s gratifying to see these exciting results coming from the early EMU observations,” said EMU survey leader Professor Andrew Hopkins, an astronomer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Macquarie University.

“EMU is an incredibly ambitious project with scientific goals that range from understanding star and galaxy evolution to cosmological measurements of dark matter and dark energy, and much more.”

“The discoveries from this early work demonstrate the power of the ASKAP telescope to deliver sensitive images over wide areas of sky, offering a tantalizing glimpse of what the full EMU survey may reveal.”

“This investigation has been critical in allowing us to design the main survey, which we expect will start in early 2022.”

Using the ASKAP telescope, Professor Hopkins and colleagues captured the sharpest radio images of the Large Magellanic Cloud ever recorded.

They also studied the stars themselves which form the structure of this dwarf galaxy, including the Tarantula Nebula, the most active star-formation region in the Local Group.

Furthermore, they analyzed radio emission from background galaxies as well as stars in the foreground from our own Milky Way.

“The sharp and sensitive new image reveals thousands of radio sources we’ve never seen before,” said Dr. Clara Pennock, an astronomer in the Lennard-Jones Laboratories at Keele University.

“Most of these are actually galaxies millions or even billions of light years beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

“We typically see them because of the supermassive black holes in their centers which can be detected at all wavelengths, especially radio.”

“But we now also start finding many galaxies in which stars are forming at a tremendous rate.”

“Combining these data with previous observations from X-ray, optical and infrared telescopes will allow us to explore these galaxies in extraordinary detail.”

“With so many stars and nebulae packed together, the increased sharpness of the image has been instrumental in discovering radio emitting stars and compact nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud,” said Dr. Jacco van Loon, also from the Lennard-Jones Laboratories at Keele University.

“We see all sorts of radio sources, from individual fledgling stars to planetary nebulae that result from the death of stars like the Sun.”

originally from SciNews

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