Our first news item comes to us from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder or ASKAP. This new facility has imaged 83 percent of the visible sky, and in just 300 hours was able to map approximately three million galaxies in long radio wavelengths. This was possible thanks to a combination of a large field of view and innovative radio receivers. At this point, this isn’t a story with great scientific results; this is a story of a great data set and a successfully launched new telescope array. This new data set demonstrates that ASKAP will be able to image the entire visible sky in radio-wavelengths in weeks rather than years.

And the data that is being obtained is huge. Raw off the telescopes, this new survey generated 13.5 exabytes. Once processed, it transformed into 70 billion pixels, 903 images, and 26 terabytes of data containing an estimated one million previously unknown galaxies. This entire data set will be made publicly available through the CSIRO Data Access Portal, and in the coming years, I expect to see an onslaught of research papers that allow us to understand the evolution of the universe and its large scale structure of galaxies like never before.

What is particularly exciting to me is that we are now a few years away from having both radio and optical telescopes that are able to rapidly map the entire sky every few nights. The Vera Rubin Observatory and its LSST telescope are delayed by COVID-19 but near completion. Together, these two survey systems will have the ability to reveal the moment-to-moment, amazing changes of our sky in new ways, and I suspect that no one has guessed what amazing new things will be in that data.

All right, I need 60 Terabytes of hard drive space; it’s time to go play with data.

More Information

CSIRO press release 

“The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey I: Design and First Results,” D. McConnell et al., 2020 Nov. 30, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia