It's a wide and wonderful Universe out there, but the place just got a little more crowded.
Scientists have just discovered a swathe of over 300,000 galaxies in one corner of our northern sky, that we've never laid eyes on before.
Images courtesy: NASA
The discovery was made thanks to data from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope network in Europe. Though we've been able to look at that spot of the sky before, the LOFAR added tremendous amounts of new details, leading to new discoveries of a varied nature, from magnetic fields, to black holes, and more.
Though we can't see the light from these newly-discovered stars, the cosmos between is still lit up with low frequency waves produced by accelerating particles and electromagnetic fields. The LOFAR, with its 20,000 antennae across 48 stations in the Netherlands, captures these waves and measures them.
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Despite finding 325,694 new galaxies, the survey has only been about 20 percent completed so far, and only 10 percent of the available data is opened up to scientists around the world.
But another finding from this study confirms a previous theory, that galaxies of a sufficient size often hide massive black holes that swallow everything. These black holes end up shooting out jets of matter that shine as radio waves, which is how these new galaxies were found.
"LOFAR has a remarkable sensitivity and that allows us to see that these jets are present in all of the most massive galaxies, which means that their black holes never stop eating," says astrophysicist Philip Best from the University of Edinburgh.
"What we are beginning to see with LOFAR is that in some cases, clusters of galaxies that are not merging can also show this emission, albeit at a very low level that was previously undetectable," says astrophysicist Annalisa Bonafede from the University of Bologna.
"This discovery tells us that besides merger events, there are other phenomena that can trigger particle acceleration over huge scales."