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posted by azrael on Friday July 25 2014, @05:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-kind-of-atmosphere dept.

From the University of Sydney:

A new home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres is giving Australian astronomers the first 'Google street view' of the cosmos - incredibly detailed views of huge numbers of galaxies.

Developed by researchers at the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, the optical-fibre bundles can sample the light from up to 60 parts of a galaxy, for a dozen galaxies at a time.

By analysing the light's spectrum astronomers can learn how gas and stars move within each galaxy, where the young stars are forming and where the old stars live. This will allow them to better understand how galaxies change over time and what drives that change.

"It's a giant step," said Dr James Allen of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at the University of Sydney.

"Before, we could study one galaxy at a time in detail, or lots of galaxies at once but in much less detail. Now we have both the numbers and the detail."

The Australian team is now a year or two ahead of its international competition in this field. In just 64 nights it has gathered data on 1000 galaxies, twice as many as the previous largest project, and over the next two years it will study another 2000.

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Astronomers Discover Seven Dwarf Galaxies 11 comments

Abstract: http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/782/2/L24/

By using a new telescope made by stitching together telephoto lenses, astronomers have discovered seven previously unseen galaxies while probing a nearby spiral galaxy.

The Yale scientists will tackle a key question next: Are these seven newly found objects dwarf galaxies orbiting around the M101 spiral galaxy, or are they located much closer or farther away, and just by chance are visible in the same direction as M101?

If it's the latter, Merritt said, these objects represent something entirely different. "There are predictions from galaxy formation theory about the need for a population of very diffuse, isolated galaxies in the universe," Merritt said. "It may be that these seven galaxies are the tip of the iceberg, and there are thousands of them in the sky that we haven't detected yet."

Merritt stressed that until they collect more data and determine the distances to the objects, researchers won't know their true nature. But the possibilities are intriguing enough that the team has been granted the opportunity to use the Hubble Space Telescope for further study.

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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday July 25 2014, @06:55PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Friday July 25 2014, @06:55PM (#73904)

    this would be kinda cool if it has a tour button like celestia....

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday July 25 2014, @07:23PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday July 25 2014, @07:23PM (#73912) Homepage

      It probably doesn't, because it's probably actually nothing like Google Street View. Tellingly, no-one is attributed as actually describing it thus.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday July 25 2014, @07:10PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday July 25 2014, @07:10PM (#73910) Journal

    Well, this will surely help the search for extraterrestrial intelligences: They'll just make themselves known by asking their home star to get blurred.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Ken_g6 on Friday July 25 2014, @10:35PM

    by Ken_g6 (3706) on Friday July 25 2014, @10:35PM (#73974)

    From Discover magazine, 22 years ago: [discovermagazine.com]

    The trick in doing high-volume surveys is taking many redshifts at once. Traditionally, astronomers get the redshifts of galaxies by positioning their telescopes so that a single galaxy's light falls on the aperture of a spectrometer. When they have all the information they need on this lone galaxy, they move on to the next one, then the next and the next, and so on.

    Kirshner, Oemler, and colleague Steve Shectman do the same thing, only a hundred galaxies at a time. Guided by surveys they've taken previously of the southern sky to mark the positions of appropriate galaxies, they drill tiny holes in a round aluminum plate 36 inches across, each hole corresponding to the point where a galaxy will appear in the telescope's field of view. Then, down in Chile, the astronomers fit the plate to the telescope and attach a fiber-optic cable to the back of each hole. When the plate is perfectly aligned with its designated piece of sky, the light from 112 galaxies enters 112 holes, bounces down a cable, and enters a spectrometer. Each exposure lasts for two hours; it then takes about 20 minutes to switch the optical fibers to a new set of holes in the plate representing a new set of galaxies.

    This particular spectrometer, says Kirshner, is called the two-dimensional, or 2D, photon counter, so we call it the 2D-Frutti for short. We call the whole setup the Fruit and Fiber.