‘Google street view’ of galaxies a reality

‘Google street view’ of galaxies a reality
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‘Google street view’ of galaxies a reality, Australian astronomers have developed a home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres that gives the first ‘Google street view’ of the cosmos.

Sydney: Australian astronomers have developed a home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres that gives the first ‘Google street view’ of the cosmos.

Developed by researchers at University of Sydney and Australian Astronomical Observatory, the optical-fibre instrument called SAMI can sample the light from up to 60 parts of a galaxy for a dozen galaxies at a time.

By analysing the light's spectrum, astronomers can learn how gas and stars move within each galaxy, where the young stars are forming and where the old stars live.

Using the new instrument, astronomers have already spotted “galactic winds” - streams of charged particles travelling at up to 3,000 km a second - from the centre of two galaxies.

“It is a giant step. Before this, we could study one galaxy at a time in detail or lots of galaxies at once but in much less detail. Now we have both the numbers and the detail,” explained James Allen of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at University of Sydney. In just 64 nights, the team has gathered data on 1,000 galaxies and over the next two years, it will study another 2,000.

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