A new map of the night sky charts of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown galaxies has been discovered using a telescope that can detect light sources that optical instruments cannot see.
The discovery was made by a team of international experts. They say this discovery sheds new light on some of the universe’s deepest secrets, including the physics of black holes and how clusters of galaxies evolve.
Astronomer at the Paris Observatory in France, Cyril Tasse, says this is a new window into the universe.
More than 200 astronomers from 18 countries were involved in the study, which used radio astronomy to look at a segment of the sky over the northern hemisphere and found 300 000 previously unseen light sources thought to be distant galaxies.
Radio astronomy allows scientists to detect radiation produced when massive celestial objects interact.
The team plans to create high-resolution images of the entire northern sky, which it says will reveal as many as 15 million as yet undetected radio sources.
Tassa says the oldest objects in the universe are around 12 billion light-years-old so they are going to see lots more of these objects.
