‘Dancing ghosts:’ a new, deeper scan of the sky throws up surprises for astronomers

Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos.

We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were.

But where does the intergalactic wind come from?

‘Dancing ghosts:’ a new, deeper scan of the sky throws up surprises for astronomers

Why is it so tangled?

And what is causing the streams of radio emission?

When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before, you are likely to make new discoveries.

The two galaxies we think are responsible for the streams of electrons (shown as curved arrows) that form the Dancing Ghosts. But we don’t understand what is causing the filament labelled as 3

A deep search returns many surprises

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These had never been seen before because they are so rare and faint.

We still dont know what they are, but we are working furiously to find out.

The image produced by the EMU Pilot Survey. The full moon is shown for scale in the bottom left. The dancing ghosts are barely a pin-prick on this image.

We are finding surprises even in places we thought we understood.

ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission.

The EMU project goes deep enough to see them too.

The first ‘Odd Radio Circle’. Radio data are green and the white and coloured data show the optical background from the Dark Energy Survey

EMU can even trace the spiral arms in the nearest ones.

EMU will help us understand the birth of new stars in these galaxies.

These some of the first results the EMU project, which we started in 2009.

A giant radio galaxy with plumes of electrons stretching nearly 5 million light years from top to bottom of the image. These plumes had never been seen before the EMU Pilot Survey, even though the galaxy IC5063 (the bright blob in the centre) is a very well-studied galaxy. The radio emission (white) is superimposed on an optical imge (coloured) from the dark energy survey.