filaments Archives

March 17, 2022March 17, 2022 by Evan Gough

A Pulsar is Blasting out Jets of Matter and Antimatter

This image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes shows an extremely long beam, or filament, of matter and antimatter extending from a relatively tiny pulsar, as reported in our latest press release. With its tremendous scale, this beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons, scientists have detected throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./M. de Vries; Optical: NSF/AURA/Gemini Consortium

Why is there so much antimatter in the Universe? Ordinary matter is far more plentiful than antimatter, but scientists keep detecting more and more antimatter in the form of positrons. More positrons reach Earth than standard models predict. Where do they come from?

Scientists think pulsars are one source, and a new study strengthens that idea.

July 1, 2020July 3, 2020 by Evan Gough

Complete and Total Mayhem in a Distant Galaxy Collision

The filamentary structures observed by LOFAR at the center of Abell 2255, here reported in red. These radio emissions are due to trails of particles and magnetic fields released by the galaxies during their motion inside the cluster (credits: Botteon et al. (2020) – LOFAR – SDSS).

A cluster of galaxies is nothing trivial. The shocks, the turbulence, the energy, as all of that matter and energy merges and interacts. And we can watch all the chaos and mayhem as it happens.

A team of astronomers are looking at the galaxy cluster Abell 2255 with the European Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, and their images are showing some never-before-seen details in this actively merging cluster.