Tag: sky survey

In perfect viewing conditions, with good eyesight and clear, dark skies, the average person can see between 2,500 and 5,000 stars in the night sky. Add a telescope to the mix, and the number of visible objects in the sky explodes exponentially. For example, in 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope famously pointed its mirrors at a tiny piece of empty space – about 1/12^th the size of the Moon – and revealed three thousand new objects crammed into that little area, most of them distant galaxies, offering a glimpse of the past stretching back to the early Universe. The astounding implication of the Hubble Deep Field image was that there are still billions of objects out there yet unseen by human eyes (or telescopes). Since then, the process of surveying deep space has been a massive ongoing undertaking, using all the tools available to us, from visible light telescopes like Hubble to infrared and radio telescopes. In a new data dump last week, a major radio sky survey, LOFAR, has revealed over a million new, never before seen objects in the night sky.