WALLABY : Radio Telescope In Western Australia
WALLABY, or the Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind survey, is a radio telescope in Western Australia that is helping astronomers build a three-dimensional map of the night sky, mapping galaxies as far as a billion light years away.
- Radio astronomy involves tracking the signals from radio waves and helps detect and trace stellar objects that cannot be traced by light.
- It Provide pictures of where galaxies are actually located in relation to one another in three-dimensional space.
- It will be able to tell apart galaxies that appear clustered together but are actually millions of light years apart.
- The aim of WALLABY is to use the powerful widefield phased-array technology of ASKAP(Australian SKA Pathfinder) to observe three-quarters of the whole sky in the 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen (or HI) at 30-arcsec resolution, thereby detecting and imaging the gas distribution in hundreds of thousands of external galaxies in the local Universe.
- This will allow astronomers to gain a much improved understanding of the processes involved in galaxy formation and evolution, and the role of stellar and black hole feedback, gas accretion and galaxy interactions in these processes.
