If you think you’ve seen the Milky Way, think again. Astronomers just unveiled what might be the most impressive portrait of our home galaxy ever captured, and it’s not in the visible light you’d expect. This is a radio image, showing our galaxy in wavelengths our eyes can’t see, revealing secrets that ordinary telescopes would completely miss.
Silvia Mantovanini, a PhD student at ICRAR’s Curtin University node, basically spent a year and a half of her life staring at radio data. The result? An absolutely massive low-frequency radio color image that makes previous attempts look like rough sketches. We’re talking about twice the resolution, ten times the sensitivity, and coverage of twice as much sky compared to what we had before.
The numbers behind this project are pretty wild. Mantovanini needed roughly 1 million CPU hours on supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre just to process everything. That’s the kind of computing power that makes you appreciate how far technology has come in helping us understand the cosmos.
What Makes This Image Actually Special
Here’s the thing about radio astronomy that most people don’t get. When you look at the night sky with your eyes, you’re seeing maybe 1% of what’s actually happening out there. Radio waves show us stuff that visible light completely hides, like the birth and death of stars, the leftover energy from supernova explosions, and bizarre objects like pulsars spinning hundreds of times per second.
This new image pulls data from two major surveys. GLEAM (GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA) observed the sky over 28 nights back in 2013 and 2014. Then GLEAM-X followed up with 113 nights of observations between 2018 and 2020. All of this was done using the Murchison Widefield Array telescope sitting out on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia.
The telescope itself is located at a place with the wonderfully poetic name Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara. Remote locations like this are perfect for radio astronomy because they’re far from the electronic noise that civilization creates. Your WiFi router, your phone, your microwave oven, they all scream in radio frequencies that would drown out the faint whispers from dying stars billions of miles away.
Reading the Galaxy Like a Map
Mantovanini describes what she’s seeing in terms that almost sound simple. The large red circles? Those are supernova remnants, the expanding shells of gas and energy left behind when massive stars exploded. The smaller blue regions show stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming right now. It’s like being able to see both the cradles and the graves of stars in a single image.
This matters more than you might think for science as a whole. Astronomers believe there are thousands of supernova remnants in our galaxy that we just haven’t found yet. We’ve identified hundreds, but the math suggests we’re missing most of them. An image like this makes it way easier to separate the glowing gas around baby stars from the debris fields of dead ones.
Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker, who leads the GLEAM-X survey, points out something interesting. No one has ever published a low-frequency radio image of the entire Southern Galactic Plane before. This is literally the first time we’re seeing this view of our galaxy. That’s pretty remarkable for 2026, when you think about it.
What Comes Next
The catalog that came from these surveys includes about 98,000 radio sources. Pulsars, planetary nebulae, dense clouds of ionized gas, and even distant galaxies way beyond the Milky Way. Each one of those sources is a story waiting to be investigated further.
Pulsars especially benefit from this kind of multi-frequency observation. These rapidly spinning neutron stars send out beams of radio waves like cosmic lighthouses, and by measuring how bright they appear across different frequencies, astronomers can figure out how they generate those radio emissions and where exactly they’re located in the galactic neighborhood.
The only thing that’s going to beat this image is the SKA-Low telescope, part of the massive Square Kilometre Array Observatory project that’s being built on the same Wajarri Yamaji Country. That won’t be finished for another decade or so, which means Mantovanini’s work is going to be the gold standard for low-frequency radio imaging of the Milky Way for years to come.
Sometimes research projects come along that completely shift how we understand something fundamental, and you can tell this is one of those moments just by looking at what it took to create it: 18 months of work, a million CPU hours, hundreds of nights of telescope observations, and one very dedicated PhD student who probably dreamed in radio frequencies by the end. The Milky Way has been photographed countless times, but we’ve never quite seen it look like this before.
