filaments Archives

December 9, 2024December 9, 2024 by Evan Gough

Hubble Gets its Best Look At the First Quasar

3C 273 is the uninspiring name given to the very first quasar to be linked with a visual object. Prior to that, quasars were known only by their radio emissions. The Hubble recently took a new, better look at the quasar, seen in this image. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI

The term quasar comes from quasi-stellar objects, a name that reflected our uncertainty about their nature. The first quasars were discovered solely because of their radio emissions, with no corresponding visual objects. This is surprising since quasars blaze with the light of trillions of stars.

In recent observations, the Hubble examined a historical quasar named 3C 273, the first quasar to be linked with a visual object.

November 15, 2024November 15, 2024 by Evan Gough

It Takes Very Special Conditions to Create This Bizarre Stellar Spectacle

A binary star system called R Aquarii undergoes violent eruptions that blast out huge filaments of glowing gas in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble)

A stellar odd couple 700 light-years away is creating a chaotically beautiful display of colourful, gaseous filaments. The Hubble captured the pair, named R Aquarii, and their symbiotic interactions. Every 44 years the system’s violent eruptions blast out filaments of gas at over 1.6 million kilometers per hour.

June 21, 2024June 21, 2024 by Evan Gough

The JWST Peers into the Heart of Star Formation

In this image of the Serpens Nebula from the Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found a grouping of aligned protostellar outflows within one small region (the top left corner). In the Webb image, these jets are identified by bright red clumpy streaks, which are shockwaves caused when the jet hits the surrounding gas and dust. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Pontoppidan (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), J. Green (Space Telescope Science Institute)

The James Webb Space Telescope has unlocked another achievement. This time, the dynamic telescope has peered into the heart of a nearby star-forming region and imaged something astronomers have longed to see: aligned bipolar jets.

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.