Space and astronomy news
If we want to know what it’ll look like in about 4.5 billion years when our galaxy merges with Andromeda, we might take a look at ARP 220. ARP 220 is a pair of galaxies that are in the process of merging. The merging galaxies emit brilliant infrared light, and the James Webb Space Telescope captured that light in a vivid portrait.
Continue reading “JWST Sees Merging Galaxies Releasing the Light of a Trillion Suns”
One of the more intriguing aspects of the cosmos, which the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed astronomers to explore, is the phenomenon known as gravitational lenses. As Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity describes, the curvature of spacetime is altered by the presence of massive objects and their gravity. This effect leads to objects in space (like galaxies or galaxy clusters) altering the path light travels from more distant objects (and amplifying it as well). By taking advantage of this with a technique known as Gravitational Lensing, astronomers can study distant objects in greater detail.
Consider the image above, the ESA’s picture of the month acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The image shows a vast gravitational lens caused by SDSS J1226+2149, a galaxy cluster located roughly 6.3 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. The lens these galaxies created greatly amplified light from the more distant Cosmic Seahorse galaxy. Combined with Webb‘s incredible sensitivity, this technique allowed astronomers to study the Cosmic Seahorse in the hopes of learning more about star formation in early galaxies.
Continue reading “This JWST Image Shows Gravitational Lensing at its Finest”
Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field revealed thousands of galaxies in a seemingly empty spot in the sky. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has taken deep field observations to the next level with its COSMOS-Web survey, revealing 25,000 galaxies in just six pictures, the first from this new survey.
“It’s incredibly exciting to get the first data from the telescope for COSMOS-Web,” said principal investigator Jeyhan Kartaltepe, from the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Physics and Astronomy, in press release. “Everything worked beautifully and the data are even better than we expected. We’ve been working really hard to produce science quality images to use for our analysis and this is just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come.”
Continue reading “JWST Sees So Many Galaxies, and It's Just Getting Started”
Over 13 billion years ago, the first galaxies in the Universe formed. They were elliptical, with intermediate black holes (IMBHs) at their centers surrounded by a halo of stars, gas, and dust. Over time, these galaxies evolved by flattening out into disks with a large bulge in the middle. They were then drawn together by mutual gravitational attraction to form galaxy clusters, massive collections that comprise the large-scale cosmic structure. This force of attraction also led to mergers, where galaxies and their central black holes came together to create larger spiral galaxies with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs).
This process of mergers and assimilation (and their role in galactic evolution) is still a mystery to astronomers today since much of it took place during the early Universe, which is still very difficult to observe with existing telescopes. Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the International Gemini Observatory, an international team of astronomers observed a lone distant galaxy that appears to have consumed all of its former companions. Their findings, which recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest galaxies in the early Universe grew faster than previously thought.
Continue reading “A Distant Galaxy Ate All of its Friends. Now It’s All Alone”
When is 50,000 light-years only a small distance? When three galaxies are that close to one another. At that range, they’re fiercely interacting.
In the case of the three galaxies referred to as SDSSCGB 10189, they’re 50,000 light-years apart and growing closer as they merge into a single massive galaxy.
Continue reading “Hubble Sees an Epic Merger of Three Galaxies”
What contains a petabyte of data on more than a billion galaxies in one of the most extensive sky maps? The answer: the ever-expanding Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey. The galaxies it charts are part of the largest two-dimensional map of the sky ever made. And, just recently, it grew even larger with the addition of new data from telescopes in the U.S. and Chile.
Continue reading “A New Survey of the Sky Contains Over One Billion Galaxies”
In the first data taken last summer with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the new James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found six galaxies from a time when the Universe was only 3% of its current age, just 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. While its incredible JWST saw these galaxies from so long ago, the data also pose a mystery.
These galaxies should be mere infants, but instead they resemble galaxies of today, containing 100 times more stellar mass than astronomers were expecting to see so soon after the beginning of the Universe. If confirmed, this finding calls into question the current thinking of galaxy formation and challenges most models of cosmology.
Continue reading ““The Universe Breakers”: Six Galaxies That are Too Big, Too Early”
Astronomers have studied the star formation process for decades. As we get more and more capable telescopes, the intricate details of one of nature’s most fascinating processes become clearer. The earliest stages of star formation happen inside a dense veil of gas and dust that stymies our observations.
But the James Webb Space Telescope sees right through the veil in its images of nearby galaxies.
Continue reading “Galaxies Aren’t Just Stars. They’re Intricate Networks of Gas and Dust”
Astronomers have discovered a galaxy with very little or no stellar mass. Galaxies like these are called ‘dark galaxies.’ It contains clouds of gas but very few stars, possibly none. This is the only isolated dark dwarf galaxy in the local universe.
Continue reading “A Galaxy has Been Found that’s Almost Entirely Dark Matter”
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) lurk in the center of large galaxies like ours. From their commanding position in the galaxy’s heart, they feed on gas, dust, stars, and anything else that strays too close, growing more massive as time passes. But in rare circumstances, an SMBH can be forced out of its position and hurtle through space as a rogue SMBH.
Continue reading “Astronomers Spot a Rogue Supermassive Black Hole, Hurtling Through Space Leaving Star Formation in its Wake”