We’ve Revealed A Galaxy Far, Far Away….

The galaxy was uncovered in radio emission travelling to Earth using CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope (ASKAP), located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO).

The team used a special technique to detect a change in radio waves coming from within the bright centre of the galaxy PKS B1740-517, located near the Ara constellation.

The five-billion-year-old radio emission was stamped with the ‘imprint’ of hydrogen gas it had travelled through on its way to Earth.

The gas absorbs some of the emission, creating a tiny dip in the signal. “At many observatories, this dip would have been hidden by background radio noise, but our site is so radio quiet it stood out clearly,” Dr Allison said.

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Rings And Loops In The Stars: Planck’s Stunning New Images

Credit: M. Peel / JCBA / Planck / ESA

A ring of dust 200 light years across and a loop covering a third of the sky: two of the results in a new map from the Planck satellite. Dr Mike Peel and Dr Paddy Leahy of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JCBA) presented the images today at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2015) at Venue Cymru, Llandudno, Wales.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Planck satellite, launched in 2009 to study the ancient light of the Big Bang, has also given us maps of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, in microwaves (radiation at cm- to mm-wavelengths). Microwaves are generated by electrons spiralling in the Galaxy’s magnetic field at nearly the speed of light (the synchrotron process); by collisions in interstellar plasma, by thermal vibration of interstellar dust grains, and by “anomalous” microwave emission (AME), which may be from spinning dust grains.

The relative strength of these processes changes with wavelength, and are separated using multi-wavelength measurements from Planck, from NASA’s WMAP satellite, and from ground-based radio telescopes, giving maps of each component.

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