The first image from the unfinished SKA-Low telescope in Western Australia has revealed almost 100 rare galaxies in what is a promising indication of the future for the world’s largest radio observatory.

The image was produced with just 1024 of the planned 131,072 antennas, or less than 1 per cent, at the station on Wajarri Yamaji Country, and shows an area of sky about the size of 100 moons.

In the image, 85 of the brightest known galaxies, which appear as pinpricks of light, are visible, millions of light years away. At the centre of each are supermassive black holes – black holes hundreds of thousands to millions of times larger in mass to our Sun.

”The quality of this image was even beyond what we hoped for using such an early version of the telescope,” SKA-Low Lead Commissioning Scientist Dr George Heald said.

“The bright galaxies we can see in this image are just the tip of iceberg.”

The SKA Telescope works by combining the signals from many antennae spread over a large area into a single ‘dish’.

“With the full telescope we will have the sensitivity to reveal the faintest and most distant galaxies, back to the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies started to form,” Heald said.

When the telescope is fully functioning, SKA says that studying the same area of sky will reveal more an 600,000 galaxies in a single frame.

“This is technically difficult work and the first step to unlocking the awesome science that will be possible,” said Heald.

SKA (Square Kilometre Array) Observatory is an international and intergovernmental radio telescope project, the WA telescope on of two SKA telescopes being built in Australia and South Africa.

The telescope today is a culmination of work from astronomers, computer scientists, and engineers from around the world over a decade, SKA-Low Telescope Director Dr Sarah Pearce said.

“It’s amazing to see all this work come together to give our first glimpse of the brilliant images that will come from SKA-Low, promising us a view of the Universe we’ve never seen before,” she said.