It looks like an abstract oil painting or a gelatinous substance in water. In fact, the image astronomers created with two Australian radio telescopes shows a stellar graveyard in the Milky Way – and capturing it could be the first step in solving a great mystery. You can see previously unobserved remnants of stellar explosions, so-called supernovae, as well as hot bubbles of ionized hydrogen in which new stars are formed. Only stars themselves are not visible because they hardly emit radio waves.
The image, taken with Australia’s Askap and Parkes radio telescopes, was created as part of the Pegasus observing project, which in turn builds on other projects including the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (Emu). The aim is to survey the entire southern sky over the next two years. According to the researchers, the first image that has now been published covers around one percent of the galactic plane of the Milky Way, roughly the apparent area of twelve full moons in the sky.
There are always impressive images from space James-Webb-space telescope produces them practically on an assembly line. But this shows things that astronomers have long sought in vain. Estimated about every 50 years should a massive star in the Milky Way run out of fuel first collapse under its own gravity and then explode as a supernova.
Where are the missing supernova remnants?
The huge clouds of dust and gas that are created can remain in space for tens of thousands of years before dissipating. So the Milky Way should be full of traces of it, but only a few hundred have been discovered so far. Researchers estimate that this is only about a fifth of the remains actually present. But where are the others?
With the combination of the two powerful radio telescopes, it has now apparently been possible to identify 21 new supernova cloud candidates at once, as one of the researchers involved in the journal Nature said. The picture now published shows five of them. This gives hope that further observations in other regions of the Milky Way will unearth many more.
Producing such images is complex: the data from the radio measurement must be evaluated and interpreted. In addition, two images were superimposed here: The Askap telescope in Western Australia, with its 36 dish antennas, makes the brightly represented structures of the stellar remnants visible. Parkes, a lone radio mirror in New South Wales, shows the hot dust between the stars, seen here mostly in green and pink. The researchers themselves were impressed by the result: “When we first opened the image, we were amazed by its quality and beauty,” says radio astronomer Ettore Carretti from the National Astrophysics Institute INAF in Bologna, who is involved in the Pegasus project a message.