So mapping the neutral hydrogen is a useful way to map the galaxies, which isn’t always easy to do with just starlight.īut as well as mapping where the galaxies are, we want to know how they live their lives, get on with their neighbours, grow and change over time. In the nearby (low-redshift) universe, most of it hangs out in galaxies. Some of the hydrogen turns into stars.Īlthough the universe has been busy making stars for most of its 13.7-billion-year life, there’s still a fair bit of neutral hydrogen around. Galaxies are made up of stars but also dark matter, dust and gas – mostly hydrogen. Neutral hydrogen – just lonely individual hydrogen atoms floating around – is the basic form of matter in the universe. Matthew Whiting, Karen Lee-Waddell and Bärbel Koribalski (all CSIRO) WALLABY team, Author provided Neutral hydrogen gas in one of the galaxies, IC 5201 in the southern constellation of Grus (The Crane), imaged in early observations for the WALLABY project. To see the farthest of these galaxies they’ll be looking three billion years back into the universe’s past, with a redshift of 0.26. They’re aiming to detect and measure neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies over three-quarters of the sky. On board the survey are a happy band of 100-plus scientists – affectionately known as the WALLABIES – from many countries, led by one of our astronomers, Bärbel Koribalski, and Lister Staveley-Smith of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research ( ICRAR), University of Western Australia. The first project we’ve been taking data for is one of ASKAP’s largest surveys, WALLABY (Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY). In the morning you have a nice batch of freshly made images from the telescope. It’s like a bread-making machine: put in the data, make some choices, press the button and leave it overnight. Once out of the telescope, the data is going through a new, almost automatic data-processing system we’ve developed. Its antennas are now churning out 5.2 terabytes of data per second (about 15 per cent of the internet’s current data rate).
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