Here’s how space would look if you had superhuman vision

Thanks to a US$50 million radio telescope array in the Australian outback, astronomers can now explore an extra-superhuman view of space.

And so can you.

On the clearest of nights, and in the darkest areas away from the haze of human electrical light, you might gaze up at the night sky in Australia and take in a scene like this:

OK — so that’s a bit of a stretch, since powerful telescopes that are more sensitive than our eyes assembled this map of the sky. But it was photographed in the rainbow of visible wavelengths, or colors, of light that humans can see.

However, there’s a whole other view of space that we mere mortals can’t see, and astronomers have been piecing it together — telescope by telescope, spacecraft by spacecraft, map by map — over the decades to unlock the universe’s deepest secrets.