Mid West telescope captures stunning new radio image of Milky Way, revealing our galaxy in vivid detail

Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research have created the biggest and most detailed low-frequency radio image of the Milky Way ever made — revealing our galaxy in a stunning new light. The image, which shows the Southern Hemisphere view of the Milky Way, captures an extraordinary range of radio wavelengths, or “radio colours” and gives scientists a powerful new way to study how stars are born, live and die. “This vibrant image delivers an unparalleled perspective of our galaxy at low radio frequencies,” said Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at Curtin University’s ICRAR node, who led the work. “It provides valuable insights into the evolution of stars, including their formation in various regions of the galaxy, how they interact with other celestial objects, and ultimately their demise.” Ms Mantovanini spent 18 months and more than 40,000 hours processing and combining data using supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth. The data came from two massive sky surveys — GLEAM and GLEAM-X — conducted with the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope, located on Wajarri Yamatji Country in the Mid West. The surveys gathered hundreds of hours of observations between 2013 and 2020, mapping the Milky Way in unprecedented detail. The new image offers twice the resolution, 10 times the sensitivity and twice the sky coverage of the previous Milky Way radio map released in 2019. The leap in detail allows astronomers to see features that were previously invisible. Ms Mantovanini explained the image helped distinguish between gas surrounding new stars and the remnants of dead ones. “You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles,” she said. “The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.” Her research focuses on supernova remnants — the expanding clouds of gas and energy left behind after stars explode. Although hundreds of these remnants are known, astronomers suspect there are thousands more waiting to be discovered. The image also provides new clues about pulsars, the rapidly spinning remnants of massive stars that emit beams of radio waves. Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker, the principal investigator of the GLEAM-X survey, said this achievement marked a major milestone in studying the Milky Way. “This low-frequency image allows us to unveil large astrophysical structures in our galaxy that are difficult to image at higher frequencies,” she said. “No low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane has been published before, making this an exciting milestone in astronomy.” “Only the world’s largest radio telescope, the SKA Observatory’s SKA-Low telescope, set to be completed in the next decade on Wajarri Yamatji Country in Western Australia, will have the capacity to surpass this image in terms of sensitivity and resolution,” concluded Associate Professor Hurley-Walker.