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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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.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday July 25 2014, @06:55PM
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
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
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
From Discover magazine, 22 years ago: [discovermagazine.com]