Astronomers reveal the most detailed radio map of the Milky Way

The project represents the largest and most detailed radio-colour view of our Galaxy ever created, visualizing the Milky Way across a wide spectrum of wavelengths. It reveals intricate structures of gas, dust, and energetic phenomena invisible in optical light, helping researchers understand how stars evolve and interact with their surroundings.

The achievement is the result of 18 months of work by Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at the Curtin University node of ICRAR. Using more than one million hours of computer processing time at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Mantovanini compiled data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, an installation of 4,096 spider-like antennas situated on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.

The image draws on observations from two major MWA projects: the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) survey conducted in 2013-2014, and its extended follow-up, GLEAM-X, which ran between 2018 and 2020. Compared with the previous GLEAM image released in 2019, this new version offers twice the resolution, ten times the sensitivity, and twice the sky coverage.

This leap in quality has enabled the team to catalogue about 98,000 radio sources visible from the Southern Hemisphere, including pulsars, planetary nebulae, compact H II regions (dense clouds of ionised gas), and distant galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

By distinguishing between these regions, astronomers can map how energy and matter circulate through the Galaxy. The image also offers new insights into pulsars, the dense, rapidly rotating remnants of dead stars. Measuring their brightness across different radio frequencies could help scientists better understand how these mysterious objects emit energy and their locations within the Milky Way.

Earlier, Kazinform News Agency reported that MIT scientists uncovered traces of Earth's lost ancestor deep beneath the surface.