But once that data is scrutinised it could lead to some
Over the next few years, we will see the universe in a very different light, and we are likely to make completely unexpected discoveries.
Radio telescopes view the sky using radio waves and mainly see jets of electrons travelling at the speed of light, propelled by super-massive black holes. That gives a very different view to the one we see when observing a clear night sky using visible light, which mainly sees light from stars.
Black holes were only found in science fiction before radio astronomers discovered them in quasars. It now seems that most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have a super-massive black hole at their centre.
From early discoveries
Radio waves from space were detected by the American Karl Jansky in the 1930s. Since then, radio telescopes – such as the 64-metre dish at Parkes, in New South Wales – increased the number of known radio sources in the sky from one (in 1940) to a few hundred thousand.
Then, around the turn of the millennium, four projects driven by new technology suddenly increased the number of known radio sources from a few hundred thousand to about 2.5 million. They were the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (WENSS, NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS, Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-cm (FIRST and the Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey (SUMSS in The Netherlands, United States and Australia.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-unexpected-big-data-boom-radioastronomy.html#jCp
