Astronomers Just Found 300,000 Hidden Galaxies in Just a Tiny Patch of Sky

Spiral galaxy M106 superimposed with the LOFAR data (yellow). (Cyril Tasse/Paris Observatory/LOFAR)

MIKE MCRAE 20 FEB 2019

The Universe just got a little more crowded with the discovery of more than 300,000 potential galaxies in a tiny corner of the northern sky.

A release of data gathered by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope network in Europe has added extraordinary new levels of detail to the map of radio waves across the cosmos, inspiring dozens of studies on everything from magnetic fields to black holes.

It's moments like these we should be grateful of our relative blindness to the radiance of the night sky - at least, if we want sleep at night. Invisible to the human eye, the Universe is in fact ablaze with low frequency waves produced by accelerating particles and electromagnetic fields.

Measuring that radio hum requires some pretty sensitive equipment. LOFAR's array of 20,000 antennas scattered across 48 stations in the Netherlands and abroad is like having a huge radio-sensitive eye on our planet's surface.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/most-sensitive-scan-yet-of-the-sky-reveals-hundreds-of-thousands-of-hidden-galaxies?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1