galaxies Archives

April 18, 2016April 8, 2018 by Evan Gough

Dwarf Dark Matter Galaxy Hides In Einstein Ring

The large blue light is a lensing galaxy in the foreground, called SDP81, and the red arcs are the distorted image of a more distant galaxy. By analyzing small distortions in the red, distant galaxy, astronomers have determined that a dwarf dark galaxy, represented by the white dot in the lower left, is companion to SDP81. The image is a composite from ALMA and the Hubble. Image: Y. Hezaveh, Stanford Univ./ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ)/NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — The large blue light is a lensing galaxy in the foreground, called SDP81, about 4 billion light years away. The red arcs are the distorted image of a more distant galaxy, about 12 billion light years away. By analyzing small distortions in the red, distant galaxy, astronomers have determined that a dwarf dark galaxy, represented by the white dot in the lower left, is bound to SDP81. The image is a composite from ALMA and the Hubble. Image: Y. Hezaveh, Stanford Univ./ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ)/NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

Everybody knows that galaxies are enormous collections of stars. A single galaxy can contain hundreds of billions of them. But there is a type of galaxy that has no stars. That’s right: zero stars.

These galaxies are called Dark Galaxies, or Dark Matter Galaxies. And rather than consisting of stars, they consist mostly of Dark Matter. Theory predicts that there should be many of these Dwarf Dark Galaxies in the halo around ‘regular’ galaxies, but finding them has been difficult.

Now, in a new paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, Yashar Hezaveh at Stanford University in California, and his team of colleagues, announce the discovery of one such object. The team used enhanced capabilities of the Atacamas Large Millimeter Array to examine an Einstein ring, so named because Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicted the phenomenon long before one was observed.

An Einstein Ring is when the massive gravity of a close object distorts the light from a much more distant object. They operate much like the lens in a telescope, or even a pair of eye-glasses. The mass of the glass in the lens directs incoming light in such a way that distant objects are enlarged.

Einstein Rings and gravitational lensing allow astronomers to study extremely distant objects, by looking at them through a lens of gravity. But they also allow astronomers to learn more about the galaxy that is acting as the lens, which is what happened in this case.

If a glass lens had tiny water spots on it, those spots would add a tiny amount of distortion to the image. That’s what happened in this case, except rather than microscopic water drops on a lens, the distortions were caused by tiny Dwarf Galaxies consisting of Dark Matter. “We can find these invisible objects in the same way that you can see rain droplets on a window. You know they are there because they distort the image of the background objects,” explained Hezaveh. The difference is that water distorts light by refraction, whereas matter distorts light by gravity.

As the ALMA facility increased its resolution, astronomers studied different astronomical objects to test its capabilities. One of these objects was SDP81, the gravitational lens in the above image. As they examined the more distant galaxy being lensed by SDP81, they discovered smaller distortions in the ring of the distant galaxy. Hezaveh and his team conclude that these distortions signal the presence of a Dwarf Dark Galaxy.

But why does this all matter? Because there is a problem in the Universe, or at least in our understanding of it; a problem of missing mass.

Our understanding of the formation of the structure of the Universe is pretty solid, at least in the larger scale. Predictions based on this model agree with observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and galaxy clustering. But our understanding breaks down somewhat when it comes to the smaller scale structure of the Universe.

One example of our lack of understanding in this area is what’s known as the Missing Satellite Problem. Theory predicts that there should be a large population of what are called sub-halo objects in the halo of dark matter surrounding galaxies. These objects can range from things as large as the Magellanic Clouds down to much smaller objects. In observations of the Local Group, there is a pronounced deficit of these objects, to the tune of a factor of 10, when compared to theoretical predictions.

Because we haven’t found them, one of two things needs to happen: either we get better at finding them, or we modify our theory. But it seems a little too soon to modify our theories of the structure of the Universe because we haven’t found something that, by its very nature, is hard to find. That’s why this announcement is so important.

The observation and identification of one of these Dwarf Dark Galaxies should open the door to more. Once more are found, we can start to build a model of their population and distribution. So if in the future more of these Dwarf Dark Galaxies are found, it will gradually confirm our over-arching understanding of the formation and structure of the Universe. And it’ll mean we’re on the right track when it comes to understanding Dark Matter’s role in the Universe. If we can’t find them, and the one bound to the halo of SDP81 turns out to be an anomaly, then it’s back to the drawing board, theoretically.

It took a lot of horsepower to detect the Dwarf Dark Galaxy bound to SDP81. Einstein Rings like SDP81 have to have enormous mass in order to exert a gravitational lensing effect, while Dwarf Dark Galaxies are tiny in comparison. It’s a classic ‘needle in a haystack’ problem, and Hezaveh and his team needed massive computing power to analyze the data from ALMA.

ALMA will consist of 66 individual antennae like these when it is complete. The facility is located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, at 5,000 meters above sea level. Credit: ALMA (ESO / NAOJ / NRAO)

ALMA, and the methodology developed by Hezaveh and team will hopefully shed more light on Dwarf Dark Galaxies in the future. The team thinks that ALMA has great potential to discover more of these halo objects, which should in turn improve our understanding of the structure of the Universe. As they say in the conclusion of their paper, “… ALMA observations have the potential to significantly advance our understanding of the abundance of dark matter substructure.”

April 15, 2016April 15, 2016 by Evan Gough

A Super-Fast Star System Shrugs Its Shoulders At Physics

This annotated artist's conception illustrates our current understanding of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. Image Credit: NASA

Astronomers have found a pair of stellar oddballs out in the edges of our galaxy. The stars in question are a binary pair, and the two companions are moving much faster than anything should be in that part of the galaxy. The discovery was reported in a paper on April 11, 2016, in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The binary system is called PB3877, and at 18,000 light years away from us, it’s not exactly in our neighborhood. It’s out past the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, past the Perseus Arm, and even the Outer Arm, in an area called the galactic halo. This binary star also has the high metallicity of younger stars, rather than the low metallicity of the older stars that populate the outer reaches. So PB3877 is a puzzle, that’s for sure.

PB3877 is what’s called a Hyper-Velocity Star (HVS), or rogue star, and though astronomers have found other HVS’s, more than 20 of them in fact, this is the first binary one found. The pair consists of a hot sub-dwarf primary star that’s over five times hotter than the Sun, and a cooler companion star that’s about 1,000 degrees cooler than the Sun.

Hyper-Velocity stars are fast, and can reach speeds of up to 1,198 km. per second, (2.7 million miles per hour,) maybe faster. At that speed, they could cross the distance from the Earth to the Moon in about 5 minutes. But what’s puzzling about this binary star is not just its speed, and its binary nature, but its location.

Hyper-Velocity stars themselves are rare, but PB3877 is even more rare for its location. Typically, hyper velocity stars need to be near enough to the massive black hole at the center of a galaxy to reach their incredible speeds. A star can be drawn toward the black hole, accelerated by the unrelenting pull of the hole, then sling-shotted on its way out of the galaxy. This is the same action that spacecraft can use when they gain a gravity assist by travelling close to a planet.

This video shows how stars can accelerate when their orbit takes them close to the super-massive black holes at the center of the Milky Way.

But the trajectory of PB3877 shows astronomers that it could not have originated near the center of the galaxy. And if it had been ejected by a close encounter with the black hole, how could it have survived with its binary nature intact? Surely the massive pull of the black hole would have destroyed the binary relationship between the two stars in PB3877. Something else has accelerated it to such a high speed, and astronomers want to know what, exactly, did that, and how it kept its binary nature.

Barring a close encounter with the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, there are a couple other ways that PB3877 could have been accelerated to such a high velocity.

One such way is a stellar interaction or collision. If two stars were travelling at the right vectors, a collision between them could impart energy to one of them and propel it to hyper-velocity. Think of two pool balls on a pool table.

Another possibility is a supernova explosion. It’s possible for one of the stars in a binary pair to go supernova, and eject it’s companion at hyper-velocity speeds. But in these cases, either stellar collision or supernova, things would have to work out just right. And neither possibility explains how a wide-binary system like this could stay intact.

Fraser Cain sheds more light on Hyper-Velocity Stars, or Rogue Stars, in this video.

There is another possibility, and it involves Dark Matter. Dark Matter seems to lurk on the edge of any discussion around something unexplained, and this is a case in point. The researchers think that there could be a massive cocoon or halo of Dark Matter around the binary pair, which is keeping their binary relationship intact.

As for where the binary star PB3788 came from, as they say in the conclusion of their paper, “We conclude that the binary either formed in the halo or was accreted from the tidal debris of a dwarf galaxy by the Milky Way.” And though the source of this star’s formation is an intriguing question, and researchers plan follow up study to verify the supernova ejection possibility, its possible relationship with Dark Matter is also intriguing.

April 7, 2016April 15, 2016 by Evan Gough

Supermassive Black Hole Found In The Cosmic Boonies

A supermassive black hole has been found in an unusual spot: an isolated region of space where only small, dim galaxies reside. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech — A team of astronomers from South Africa have noticed a series of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies that are all spinning in the same direction. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have found a massive black hole in a place they never expected to find one. The hole comes in at 17 billion solar masses, which makes it the second largest ever found. (The largest is 21 billion solar masses.) And though its enormous mass is noteworthy, its location is even more intriguing.

Supermassive black holes are typically found at the centers of huge galaxies. Most galaxies have them, including our own Milky Way galaxy, where a comparatively puny 4 million solar mass black hole is located. Not only that, these gargantuan holes tend to be located in galaxies that are part of a large cluster of galaxies. Being surrounded by all that mass is a prerequisite for the formation of supermassive black holes. The largest one known, at 21 billion solar masses, is located in a very dense region of space called the Coma Cluster, where over 1,000 galaxies have been identified.

The largest supermassive holes also tend to be surrounded by bright companions, who have also grown large from the plentiful mass in their surroundings. (Of course, its not the black holes that are bright, but the quasars that surround them.) The long and the short of it is that supermassive black holes are usually found in galaxy clusters, and usually have other supermassive companions in the same region of space. They’re not found in isolation.

But this newly found black hole is in a rather sparse region of space. It’s in NGC 1600, an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus, 200 million light years from Earth. NGC 1600 is not a particularly large galaxy, and though it has been considered part of a larger group of galaxies, all its companions are much dimmer in comparison. So NGC 1600 is a rather small, isolated galaxy, with only a few dim companions.

A supermassive black hole of 17 billion solar masses has been found in the elliptical galaxy NGC 1600, a rather isolated galaxy with only dim companions. To date, supermassive black holes have only been found in huge galaxies at the centre of large clusters of galaxies. This image is a composite image from the Hubble and from ground observatories. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Digital Sky Survey 2.

There’s another way that supermassive holes can form. Instead of growing large over time, by feeding on the mass of their home galaxies and galaxy clusters, they can form when two galaxies merge, and two smaller holes become one. But even this requires that they be in a region where galaxies are plentiful, allowing for more collisions and mergers.

It may be possible that NGC is the result of a merger of two galaxies, or that it is two black holes that are currently merging. Or it could be that NGC 1600’s region of space was once extremely rich in gas, in the early days of the Universe, and that’s what gave rise to this ‘out of place’ supermassive black hole.

There is much to be learned about the conditions that give rise to these behemoth black holes. The MASSIVE study will combine several telescopes to survey and catalogue the largest galaxies and black holes. This should tell astronomers a lot about their distribution, and about the circumstances that allow them to exist. We might find even larger ones.

April 1, 2016April 15, 2016 by Evan Gough

Andromeda’s First Spinning Neutron Star Found

Andromeda's spinning neutron star. Though astronomers think there are over 100 million of these objects in the Milky Way, this is the first one found in Andromeda. Image: ESA/XMM Newton.

On a clear night, away from the bright lights of a city, you can see the smudge of the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye. With a backyard telescope, you can take a good look at the Milky Way’s sister galaxy. With powerful observatories, it’s possible to see deep inside Andromeda, which is what astronomers have been doing for decades.

Now, astronomers combing through data from the ESA’s XMM Newton space telescope have found something rare, at least for Andromeda; a spinning neutron star. Though these objects are common in the Milky Way, (astronomers think there are over 100 million of them) this is the first one discovered in Andromeda.

A neutron star is the remnant of a massive star that went supernova. They are the smallest and most dense stellar objects known. Neutron stars are made entirely of neutrons, and have no electrical charge. They spin rapidly, and can emit electromagnetic energy.

If the neutron star is oriented toward Earth in just the right way, we can detect their emitted energy as pulses. Think of them as lighthouses, with their beam sweeping across Earth. The pulses of energy were first detected in 1967, and given the name pulsar.” We actually discovered pulsars before we knew that neutron stars existed.

Many neutron stars, including this one, exist in binary systems, which makes them easier to detect. They cannibalize their companion star, drawing gas from the companion into their magnetic fields. As they do so, they emit high energy pulses of X-ray energy.

The star in question, which astronomers, with their characteristic flair for language, have named 3XMM J004301.4+413017, spins rapidly: once every 1.2 seconds. It’s neighbouring star orbits it once every 1.3 days. While these facts are known, a more detailed understanding of the star will have to wait for more analysis. But 3XMM J004301.4+413017 does appear to be an exotic object.

“It could be what we call a ‘peculiar low-mass X-ray binary pulsar’ – in which the companion star is less massive than our Sun – or alternatively an intermediate-mass binary system, with a companion of about two solar masses,” says Paolo Esposito of INAF-Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica, Milan, Italy. “We need to acquire more observations of the pulsar and its companion to help determine which scenario is more likely.”

“We’re in a better position now to uncover more objects like this in Andromeda, both with XMM-Newton and with future missions such as ESA’s next-generation high-energy observatory, Athena,” added Norbert Schartel, ESA’s XMM-Newton project scientist.

This discovery is a result of EXTraS, a European Project that combs through XMM Newton data. “EXTraS discovery of an 1.2-s X-ray pulsar in M31” by P. Esposito et al, is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 457, pp L5-L9, Issue 1 March 21, 2016.

March 24, 2016April 12, 2016 by Evan Gough

Most ‘Outrageous’ Luminous Galaxies Ever Observed

An artist's conception of an extremely luminous infrared galaxy similar to the ones reported in this paper. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers might be running out of words when it comes to describing the brightness of objects in the Universe.

Luminous, Super-Luminous, Ultra-Luminous, Hyper-Luminous. Those words have been used to describe the brightest objects we’ve found in the cosmos. But now astronomers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found galaxies so bright that new adjectives are needed. Kevin Harrington, student and lead author of the study describing these galaxies, says, “We’ve taken to calling them ‘outrageously luminous’ among ourselves, because there is no scientific term to apply.”

The terms “ultra-luminous” and “hyper-luminous” have specific meanings in astronomy. An infrared galaxy is called “ultra-luminous” when it has a rating of about 1 trillion solar luminosities. At 10 trillion solar luminosities, the term “hyper-luminous” is used. For objects greater than that, at around 100 trillion solar luminosities, “we don’t even have a name,” says Harrington.

The size and brightness of these 8 galaxies is astonishing, and their existence comes as a surprise. Professor Min Yun, who leads the team, says, “The galaxies we found were not predicted by theory to exist; they’re too big and too bright, so no one really looked for them before.” These newly discovered galaxies are thought to be about 10 billion years old, meaning they were formed about 4 billion years after the Big Bang. Their discovery will help astronomers understand the early Universe better.

“Knowing that they really do exist and how much they have grown in the first 4 billion years since the Big Bang helps us estimate how much material was there for them to work with. Their existence teaches us about the process of collecting matter and of galaxy formation. They suggest that this process is more complex than many people thought,” said Yun.

Gravitational lensing plays a role in all this though. The galaxies are not as large as they appear from Earth. As their light passes by massive objects on its way to Earth, their light is magnified. This makes them look 10 times brighter than they really are. But event taking gravitational lensing into account, these are still impressive objects.

But it’s not just the brightness of these objects that are significant. Gravitational lensing of a galaxy by another galaxy is rare. Finding 8 of them is unheard of, and could be “another potentially important discovery,” says Yun. The paper highlights these galaxies as being among the most interesting objects for further study “because the magnifying property of lensing allows us to probe physical details of the intense star formation activities at sub-kpc scale…”

The team’s analysis also shows that the extreme brightness of these galaxies is caused solely by star formation.“The Milky Way produces a few solar masses of stars per year, and these objects look like they forming one star every hour,” Yun says. Harrington adds, “We still don’t know how many tens to hundreds of solar masses of gas can be converted into stars so efficiently in these objects, and studying these objects might help us to find out.”

It took a tag team of telescopes to discover and confirm these outrageously luminous galaxies. The team of astronomers, led by Professor Min Yun, used the 50 meter diameter Large Millimeter Telescope for this work. It sits atop an extinct volcano in Mexico, the 15,000 foot Sierra Negra. They also relied on the Herschel Observatory, and the Planck Surveyor.

March 16, 2016March 21, 2016 by Fraser Cain

Astronomy Cast Ep. 407: Galactic Cannibalism

Last week we talked about stars feasting on other stars. This week, we scale the whole process up a notch, with galaxies feasting on other galaxies. Come for the carnage, stay for the science.
Continue reading “Astronomy Cast Ep. 407: Galactic Cannibalism”

March 14, 2016March 18, 2016 by Evan Gough

The Milky Way Galaxy’s Dark Halo Of Star Formation

Dark matter is invisible. Based on the effect of gravitational lensing, a ring of dark matter has been inferred in this image of a galaxy cluster (CL0024+17) and has been represented in blue. Image: NASA/ESA.

Dark Matter is rightly called one of the greatest mysteries in the Universe. In fact, so mysterious is it, that we here in the opulent sky-scraper offices of Universe Today often joke that it should be called “Dark Mystery.” But that sounds like a cheesy History Channel show, and here at Universe Today we don’t like cheesy, so Dark Matter it remains.

Though we still don’t know what exactly Dark Matter is, we keep learning more about how it interacts with the rest of the Universe, and nibbling around at the edges of what it might be. But before we get into the latest news about Dark Matter, it’s worth stepping back a bit to remind ourselves of what is known about Dark Matter.

Evidence from cosmology shows that about 25% of the mass of the Universe is Dark Matter, also known as non-baryonic matter. Baryonic matter is ‘normal’ matter, which we are all familiar with. It’s made up of protons and neutrons, and it’s the matter that we interact with every day.

Cosmologists can’t see the 25% of matter that is Dark Matter, because it doesn’t interact with light. But they can see the effect it has on the large scale structure of the Universe, on the cosmic microwave background, and in the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. So they know it’s there.

Large galaxies like our own Milky Way are surrounded by what is called a halo of Dark Matter. These huge haloes are in turn surrounded by smaller sub-haloes of Dark Matter. These sub-haloes have enough gravitational force to form dwarf galaxies, like the Milky Way’s own Sagittarius and Canis Major dwarf galaxies. Then, these dwarf galaxies themselves have their own Dark Matter haloes, which at this scale are now much too small to contain gas or stars. Called dark satellites, these smaller haloes are of course invisible to telescopes, but theory states they should be there.

But proving that these dark satellites are even there requires some evidence of the effect they have on their host galaxies.

Now, thanks to Laura Sales, who is an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside’s, Department of Physics and Astronomy, and her collaborators at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands, Tjitske Starkenberg and Amina Helmi, there is more evidence that these dark satellites are indeed there.

In their paper “Dark influences II: gas and star formation in minor mergers of dwarf galaxies with dark satellites,” from November 2015, they provide an analysis of theory-based computer simulations of the interaction between a dwarf galaxy and a dark satellite.

Their paper shows that when a dark satellite is at its closest point to a dwarf galaxy, the satellite’s gravitational influence compresses the gas in the dwarf. This causes a sustained period of star formation, called a starburst, that can last for billions of years.

NGC 5253 is one of the nearest of the known Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxies, and is located at a distance of about 12 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Centaurus. It is experiencing a starburst of hot, young stars, which could be caused by dark satellites. Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble.

Their modelling suggests that dwarf galaxies should be exhibiting a higher rate of star formation than would otherwise be expected. And observation of dwarf galaxies reveals that that is indeed the case. Their modelling also suggests that when a dark satellite and a dwarf galaxy interact, the shape of the dwarf galaxy should change. And again, this is born out by the observation of isolated spheroidal dwarf galaxies, whose origin has so far been a mystery.

The exact nature of Dark Matter is still a mystery, and will probably remain a mystery for quite some time. But studies like this keep shining more light on Dark Matter, and I encourage readers who want more detail to read it.

February 12, 2016March 27, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Weekly Space Hangout – Feb. 12, 2016: Amy Shira Teitel

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain)

Special Guest: Amy Shira Teitel, Author of “Breaking the Chains of Gravity” that was released in the States on January 12, 2016. Contributing writer for Vintage Space column on Popular Science, and host at Discovery News.

Guests:
Morgan Rehnberg (cosmicchatter.org / @MorganRehnberg )
Jolene Creighton (fromquarkstoquasars.com / @futurism)

Continue reading “Weekly Space Hangout – Feb. 12, 2016: Amy Shira Teitel”

February 10, 2016March 18, 2016 by Evan Gough

Great Attractor Revealed? Galaxies Found Lurking Behind the Milky Way

Milky Way by Matt Dieterich — Milky Way (without the constellations) by Matt Dieterich

Hundreds of galaxies hidden from sight by our own Milky Way galaxy have been studied for the first time. Though only 250 million light years away—which isn’t that far for galaxies—they have been obscured by the gas and dust of the Milky Way. These galaxies may be a tantalizing clue to the nature of The Great Attractor.

On February 9th, an international team of scientists published a paper detailing the results of their study of these galaxies using the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Parkes radio telescope, a 64 meter telescope in Australia. The ‘scope is equipped with an innovative new multi-beam receiver, which made it possible to peer through the Milky Way into the galaxies behind it.

The area around the Milky Way that is obscured to us is called the Zone of Avoidance (ZOA). This study focused on the southern portion of the ZOA, since the telescope is in Australia. (The northern portion of the ZOA is currently being studied by the Arecibo radio telescope, also equipped with the new multi-beam receiver.) The significance of their work is not that they found hundreds of new galaxies. There was no reason to suspect that galactic distribution would be any different in the ZOA than anywhere else. What’s significant is what it will tell us about The Great Attractor.

The Great Attractor is a feature of the large-scale structure of the Universe. It is drawing our Milky Way galaxy, and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies, towards it with the gravitational force of a million billion suns. The Great Attractor is an anomaly, because it deviates from our understanding of the universal expansion of the universe. “We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,” said Professor Lister Staveley-Smith of The University of Western Australia, the lead author of the study.

“We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour.”

The core of the Milky Way seen in Infrared. Seeing through this has been a real challenge. Credit: NASA/Spitzer

Professor Staveley-Smith and his team reported that they found 883 galaxies, of which over one third have never been seen before. “The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it’s very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it,” he said.

The team identified new structures in the ZOA that could help explain the movement of The Milky Way, and other galaxies, towards The Great Attractor, at speeds of up to 200 million kilometres per hour. These include three galaxy concentrations, named NW1, NW2, and NW3, and two new clusters, named CW1 and CW2.

University of Cape Town astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg, a member of the team who did this work, says “An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn’t know about until now.”

How exactly these new galaxies affect The Great Attractor will have to wait for further quantitative analysis in a future study, according to the paper. The data from the Arecibo scope will show us the northern hemisphere of the ZOA, which will also help build our understanding. But for now, just knowing that there are hundreds of new galaxies in our region of space sheds some light on the large-scale structure of our neighbourhood in the universe.

February 4, 2016March 18, 2016 by Evan Gough

The Highest-Resolution Image Ever Seen in Astronomy

A jet of material being ejected out of a black hole at the centre of the galaxy BL Lacertae. Image: Dr. Jose L. Gomez

What do you get when you combine 15 radio telescopes on Earth and one in space? You get an enormous “virtual telescope” that is 63,000 miles across. And when you point it at a distant black hole, you get the highest resolution image every seen in astronomy.

Although it looks just like a big green blob, it’s actually an enormously energetic jet of matter streaming out of a black hole. And this black hole is 900 million light years away.

As reported at Popular Science, it required an array of 15 radio telescopes on Earth, and the Russian space telescope Spektr-R, to capture the image. This technique—called interferometry—is like creating a telescope that is 63,000 miles across. The detail it provides is like seeing a 50 cent coin on the Moon.

For perspective, the object in the image is 186 billion miles long, at minimum, and would just barely fit in the Oort Cloud.