Galaxy center Archives

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Giant Collision Decouples Dark Matter from Regular Matter

This artist's concept shows what happened when two massive clusters of galaxies, collectively known as MACS J0018.5, collided: The dark matter in the galaxy clusters (blue) sailed ahead of the associated clouds of hot gas, or normal matter (orange). Both dark matter and normal matter feel the pull of gravity, but only the normal matter experiences additional effects like shocks and turbulence that slow it down during collisions. Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

Dark matter is a mysterious and captivating subject. It’s a strange concept and we don’t really have a handle on what it actually is. One of the strongest pieces of evidence that dark matter is a particle comes from cosmic collisions. These collisions chiefly occur when clusters of galaxies interact such as the famous Bullet Cluster. Gravitational lensing reveals how the dark matter component couples from gas and dust in the cluster but now, astronomers have found another galaxy cluster collision but it is different, showing the collision from a new angle.

December 14, 2023December 14, 2023 by Matt Williams

Breakthrough Listen Scans Entire Galaxies for Signals From Extremely Advanced Civilizations

Breakthrough Listen has released the results of its latest survey - the center of 97 galaxies!

In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake led the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiment at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In the more than sixty years that have since passed, astronomers have conducted multiple surveys in search of technological activity (aka. technosignatures). To date, Breakthrough Listen is the most ambitious SETI experiment, combining data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the Parkes Murriyang Telescope, the Automated Planet Finder, and the MeerKAT Radio Telescope and advanced analytics.

The program includes a survey of the one million closest stars to Earth, the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane, and the 100 closest galaxies to ours. In a recent paper, members of Breakthrough Listen presented the results of their radio technosignature search of the centers of 97 nearby galaxies observed by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. This search was one of the largest and broadest
searches for radio evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence ever undertaken, surveying trillions of stars at four frequency bands. Unfortunately, no compelling candidates were found.

February 26, 2021February 26, 2021 by Andy Tomaswick

The Core Of The Milky Way Is An Extreme Place

Astronomers always like to look at incredibly violent places. Violence, in the astronomical sense, makes for rare conditions that can explain much about our universe. One of the violent places that astronomers love to study is the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard have come up with a new catalogue of some of the most intense areas near the galactic core. They hope it will increase our understanding of these potential star-forming regions – and help explain why so few stars are actually formed in them.