Galaxies as we had never seen them before: billions of light years away from ours, they appear for the first time in ultra HD in the most detailed images ever made, thanks to radio signals captured by the Lofar network made up of over 70,000 small antennas spread across nine countries Europeans. The results are published in 11 articles in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics by an international team of experts, which also includes researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics (Inaf) and the University of Bologna. Thanks to record resolution, the images reveal hitherto unknown aspects that could change our understanding of the evolution of galaxies and black holes.
In fact, radio waves, unlike normal visible light, are able to pass through the clouds of gas and dust that envelop many astronomical objects.
Captured by Lofar's antennas, they allowed astronomers to see otherwise invisible things, such as what happens in star-forming regions or in active galactic nuclei where supermassive black holes harbor.
"These are the first low frequency radio images ever obtained with a quality and angular resolution comparable to those produced by the Hubble telescope in optical band", explains to Media Inaf the first author of one of the 11 articles, astrophysicist Etienne Bonnassieux, researcher at the University of Bologna and Inaf associate.
“What we want to do now - anticipates Gianfranco Brunetti, astrophysicist of INAF of Bologna and Italian coordinator of the Lofar collaboration - is to map large areas of the sky with high angular resolution. In this case a difficulty is represented by the great computational demands: it will in fact be necessary to be able to effectively distribute the calculations of the complex algorithms for data analysis on supercomputers. This is the new challenge ”.