A new low-frequency radio image offers the most comprehensive view yet of the Milky Way’s southern sky.
Astronomers at the International Center of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have produced the most detailed low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way created to date.
This striking new image presents the Milky Way as seen from the Southern Hemisphere, capturing the Galaxy across a broad range of radio wavelengths, often described as different ‘colors’ of radio light.
The image opens up new opportunities for astronomers to study how stars are born, how they evolve over time, and how they end their lives within our Galaxy.
Building the image at scale
Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student based at the Curtin University node of ICRAR, spent 18 months assembling the image. The work required around 1M CPU hours, using supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre to process and combine data from two large radio surveys.
Both surveys were carried out with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.
The datasets came from the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey and its extension. These observations were collected over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014, followed by a further 113 nights between 2018 and 2020.
Focusing specifically on the Milky Way, the new image delivers major improvements over the previous GLEAM release from 2019. It achieves twice the resolution, ten times the sensitivity, and covers double the area of the earlier image.
