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

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

The Passion-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 mild 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 latest 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 knowledge in lastly answering the ‘million galaxy’ query, which is one thing the HETDEX Collaboration is working very arduous on within the coming yr,” stated research co-author Karl Gebhardt, the Herman and Joan Swimsuit Professor in Astronomy who’s challenge scientist and principal investigator of HETDEX.

“We would not be capable to do that work with out the supercomputing assets and specialists on the Texas Superior Computing Middle, by means of permitting us the computing power to run many analyses of the info 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 tutorial supercomputing heart at UT Austin. They helped course of and analyze about 60 terabytes of picture knowledge on TACC’s Corral system.

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

The quicker a star strikes away, the farther away it’s. That relationship between velocity and distance, known as Hubble’s Legislation, 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 info.

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