Hobby-Eberly telescope reveals galaxy gold mine in first large survey

Astronomers have barely scratched the floor of mapping the almost infinite stars and galaxies of the heavens. Utilizing supercomputers, researchers with The College of Texas at Austin have now revealed the areas of greater than 200,000 new astronomical objects. Their purpose is to map much more and use that information to foretell the last word destiny of the universe.

The Pastime-Eberly Telescope Darkish Power Experiment (HETDEX) has scanned the darkish skies of the Davis Mountains in West Texas since 2017 with a eager eye towards capturing spectroscopic data on Lyman-alpha frequency gentle from impartial hydrogen emission in galaxies over 10 billion light-years away. These galaxies emit a signature wavelength of sunshine that indicators the extraordinary creation of recent stars.

For the primary time, the researchers have cataloged astronomical objects—mapping over 51,863 Lyman-alpha-emitting galaxies at high redshift; 123,891 star-forming galaxies at decrease redshift; 5,274 nonemission line galaxies at low redshift; and 4,976 active galactic nuclei (AGN)—vivid spots that sign the presence of black holes.

“This new catalog provides invaluable information in lastly answering the ‘million galaxy’ query, which is one thing the HETDEX Collaboration is working very onerous on within the coming 12 months,” mentioned research co-author Karl Gebhardt, the Herman and Joan Swimsuit Professor in Astronomy who’s venture scientist and principal investigator of HETDEX.

“We would not be capable of do that work with out the supercomputing assets and consultants on the Texas Superior Computing Middle, via permitting us the computing power to run many analyses of the information and proceed to enhance the method.”

The paper describing the catalog is printed in The Astrophysical Journal. The HETDEX Collaboration entails a large team together with astronomers, engineers, technicians and graduate college students from UT Austin and 5 different academic institutions in the US and Germany.

HETDEX used the Maverick and Stampede2 supercomputers of the Texas Superior Computing Middle, a number one educational supercomputing heart at UT Austin. They helped course of and analyze about 60 terabytes of picture information on TACC’s Corral system.

A star’s redshift tells astronomers how briskly a star is shifting away from the Earth as a result of its frequency, akin to its shade, will get decrease because it strikes away, very like the horn of a practice because it passes by.

The sooner a star strikes away, the farther away it’s. That relationship between pace and distance, known as Hubble’s Regulation, can pin down a galaxy’s location and permits astronomers to create a 3D map of over 200,000 stars and galaxies with HETDEX.

The researchers labored with TACC to create JupyterHub public entry to the information.

The science generated from HETDEX provides to the larger image of understanding the enlargement of the whole universe, which is rising a lot sooner than anticipated, primarily based on exact observations from the Hubble Area Telescope in 2019 of supernovae that act like a cosmic yardstick. HETDEX goals to create an correct measure of what the universe enlargement charge was 10 billion years in the past that can reveal the bodily mannequin for darkish power.