Astronomers Reveal Incredible Map of 4.4 Million Galaxies
Durham University astronomer collaborating with a team of international scientists have mapped more than a quarter of the northern sky using the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a pan-European radio telescope.
The map reveals an astonishingly detailed radio image of more than 4.4 million objects and a very dynamic picture of our Universe, which now has been made public for the first time.
The vast majority of these objects are billions of light-years away and are either galaxies that harbor massive black holes or are rapidly growing new stars. Rarer objects that have been discovered include colliding groups of distant galaxies and flaring stars within the 
A composition radio (LoTSS-DR2) and optical (Hubble space telescope) image of the “jellyfish galaxy” NGC 4858 which is flying through a dense medium that is stripping material from the galaxy. Credit: Ian Roberts
This data release, which is by far the largest from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey, presents about a million objects that have never been seen before with any telescope and almost four million objects that are new discoveries at radio wavelengths.
This innocuous looking red quasar is one of the most powerful objects in the early Universe and was formed within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. Here we see the quasar as it looked 12.9 billion years ago when its central black hole was rapidly accreting material and creating powerful outbursts that glow at radio wavelengths. We do not yet fully understand how such powerful sources formed so soon after the Big Bang. Credit: Anniek Gloudemans
Astronomer Timothy Shimwell of ASTRON and Leiden University, said: “This project is so exciting to work on. Each time we create a map our screens are filled with new discoveries and objects that have never before been seen by human eyes. Exploring the unfamiliar phenomena that glow in the energetic radio Universe is such an incredible experience and our team is thrilled to be able to release these maps publicly. This release is only 27% of the entire survey and we anticipate it will lead to many more scientific breakthroughs in the future, including examining how the largest structures in the Universe grow, how black holes form and evolve, the physics governing the formation of stars in distant galaxies and even detailing the most spectacular phases in the life of stars in our own Galaxy.”
A composite radio (LoTSS; red) and infrared (WISE; white) image of the Coma cluster which is over 300 million light years from Earth and consists of over 1,000 individual galaxies. The radio image…
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