In an interesting achievement, scientists have supercharged the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma, Spain with new technology that will reveal how our galaxy has formed in unprecedented detail. The supercharged telescope will now be able to survey 1,000 stars per hour until it has cataloged a total of five million.
According to the reports, the super-fast mapping device linked up to WHT will analyze the make-up of each star and the speed at which it travels. This information tracked, will help scientists understand how our Milky Way galaxy assembled over billions of years.
In efforts to track the development of the Milky Way, Professor Gavin Dalton of Oxford University has spent more than a decade developing the instrument, named as ‘Weave’.
Weave installed on WHT
Weave has been charged on the WHT in order to track the movement of stars. The developed instrument, WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (Weave), sits high on a mountain top on the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma. Notably, the newly developed instrument weave has 80,000 separate parts and is being considered a miracle of engineering in today’s era.
The Milky Way galaxy is a dense spiral swirl of nearly 400 billion stars, but it took billions of years to form a galaxy as it eventually started out as a relatively small collection of stars. Multiple small galaxies came together over years to form one galaxy.
With the help of weave, scientists will be able to calculate the speed, direction, age and composition of each star. The device also creates a motion picture of stars moving in the Milky Way by watching it. According to Professor Dalton, with the help of extrapolating backward, it will be possible to reconstruct the entire formation of the Milky Way in detail.
According to the professor, the device will be able to trace the galaxies that have been absorbed while the spiral galaxy was being built up. The instrument will help us understand how galaxies are formed. It is considered that weave is going to make big revelations and answer queries that astronomers and scientists have been trying to find for years.
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