Fake 149

This image sometimes being described as a picture of the exploding supernova known as G261.9+05.5, a tribute both to Australia's new telescope, known as ASKAP and made up of 36 antennae, and to the new supercomputer which does the sums, presently being ramped up to something like its full capacity.

More carefully described by the Australians as: 'a supernova remnant is the remaining shockwave from the explosion of a dying star. Captured by CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope, and processed by the Pawsey Centre's Setonix, this shockwave is visible to radio telescopes and is mostly invisible to others. It is thought that this remnant is about 100 light-years wide and could have exploded in the Neolithic era'.

Fake in the sense that this image is an artefact of the telescope and the computer, a visualisation, rather than something you can look out of the window and just see. And I don't suppose you would see it if you pointed a large optical telescope in the right direction.

Not fake in the sense that we happen to make images from electromagnetic signals in one frequency range while radio telescopes make images from signals in another frequency range. I associate to the hawks which are said to be able to see the ultra-violet traces of the tracks of rodents while hovering overhead. Tracks which are quite invisible to us humans.

It all depends on your point of view.

PS 1: this version of the image was lifted from reference 2.

PS 2: maybe this telescope is a descendant of the one I used to pass in Cambridge, maybe half a dozen antennae trundling up and down a railway track.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/fake-148.html.

Reference 2: https://www.csiro.au/en/news/News-releases/2022/Promising-beginnings-for-supercomputer.

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