The new information will be released to scientists and the public to be used as part of Google Sky – a new application added to Google Earth.
An international team are capturing deep images of a region known as the Extended Groth Strip, an area that covers the width of four full moons. It is located close to the end of the Big Dipper's handle.
The All-wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey (AEGIS) is observing the same region of the sky in the radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, with the goal of achieving a greater understanding of the evolution of galaxies over the last 10 billion years.
Images in the optical, infrared and ultraviolet spectrum measure the sizes and shapes of galaxies, their current rates of star formation and the total number of stars each galaxy has already formed.
X-ray radiation
Academics from the global team at Imperial College London used the NASA satellite telescope Chandra to take deep images of the area to detect highly energetic X-ray radiation from objects in the sky.
"We are looking back to a time when the universe was more than half its current age and when galaxies were forming most of their stars," said Professor Kirpal Nandra from Imperial’s Department of Physics, who is leading the project.
He added: "With the X-ray images we are looking at black holes, which are at the centre of galaxies, to try to work out how the growth of black holes is linked to the growth of the galaxy itself."
Dr Elise Laird, also at Imperial and one of the lead researchers on the X-ray project, added: "Some theoretical models predict that black holes can actually stop galaxies forming stars altogether. We're now starting to test these models seriously using the AEGIS data."
Google Sky users can explore all of these pictures of the sky and select individual galaxies for a closer look.
This is the first time that there have been multi wavelength images of the sky released in Google Sky. To view the Google Earth Gallery please visit: http://earth.google.com/gallery/index.html
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Date Published: October 04, 2007
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