Space and astronomy news
Galaxy mergers are beautiful sights, but ultimately deadly. In the midst of the collision, the combined galaxy will shine brighter than it ever has before. But that glory comes with a price: all those new stars use up all the available fuel, and star formation grinds to a halt.
Continue reading “Galaxy Mergers can Boost Star Formation, and it can Also Shut it Down”
Computers are known for their ability to spot patterns. It’s what they are good at, and over the last 50+ years they have continued to improve. But they only know how to spot patterns if they know where to look for them in data. So sometimes, it falls to a human to truly see a pattern that no one expected to be there.
That is exactly what happened in the case of the discovery of the most consistent active galaxy yet discovered. Anna Payne, a graduate student at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, was looking into data collected by the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), and notice a strange feature about one of its galaxies, known as ESO 253-3: it was getting significantly brighter every 114 days.
Continue reading “An Active Galaxy That Erupts Predictably Every 114 Days Or So”
Audio narration by the author is available above
10 billion years ago, galaxies of the Universe were ablaze with the light of newly forming stars. This epic phase of history is known as “Cosmic Noon” – the height of all star creation. Galaxies like our Milky Way aren’t creating stars at nearly the rates they were in the ancient past. However, there is a time when galaxies in the present can explode with star formation – when they collide with each other. This recently published collage of merging galaxies by the Hubble HiPEEC survey (Hubble imaging Probe of Extreme Environments and Clusters) highlights six of these collisions which help us understand star formation in the early Universe.
Say hello to NGC 6946, otherwise known as the Fireworks Galaxy. This little galaxy is the most prolific producer of supernovae in the known universe, popping off those incredible explosions roughly once a decade. It’s secret? An incredibly high rate of star formation.
Continue reading “This is the Fireworks Galaxy. It’s had ten Supernovae in the Last Century Alone”
The galaxy NGC 1052-DF4 surprised scientists by having almost no dark matter to complement its stellar population. Recently a team of astronomers has provided an explanation: a nearby galaxy has stripped NGC 1052-DF4 of its dark matter, and is currently in the process of destroying the rest of it too.
Continue reading “Astronomers find a galaxy that had its dark matter siphoned away”
Galaxies build themselves up slowly over time by cannibalizing their neighbors. Using an advanced suite of computer simulations, researchers have now traced back the evolutionary history of our own Milky Way.
Continue reading “The family tree of the Milky Way. The mergers that gave us the galaxy we see today”
In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe made history when it became the first mission ever to conduct a close flyby of Pluto. This was followed by the spacecraft making the first-ever encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) – known as Arrokoth (aka. 2014 MU69) – on Dec.31st, 2018. In addition, its unique position in the outer Solar System has allowed astronomers to conduct rare and lucrative science operations.
This has included parallax measurements of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, the two closest stars to the Solar System. In addition, a team of astronomers led by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used archival data from the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to conduct measurements of the Cosmic Optical Background (COB).
Continue reading “New Horizons Saw the Universe With Even Less Light Pollution than Hubble’s View”
The behaviour of galaxies in the early Universe attracts a lot of attention from researchers. In fact, everything about the early Universe is under intense scientific scrutiny for obvious reasons. But unlike the Universe’s first stars, which have all died long ago, the galaxies we see around us—including our own—have been here since the early days.
Current scientific thinking says that in the early days of the Universe, the galaxies grew slowly, taking billions of years to become what they are now. But new observations show that might not be the case.
Continue reading “Galaxies Grew Quickly and Early On in the Universe”
Astronomers have found a new type of galaxy that is very old, very distant and very bright in ultraviolet light. This is somewhat an unusual combination, and so when this bright galaxy was first detected, the team of researchers who found it first thought it was a quasar. But detailed study revealed it was actually a galaxy with some other unusual features, which contributes to its brightness: it is busy with star formation, it has almost no dust.
As of now, this galaxy – with the license plate-type name of BOSS-EUVLG1 – appears to be the only one of its kind.
Continue reading “A Galaxy has been Found That’s as Bright as a Quasar… But it’s Not a Quasar”
The European Space Agency launched the Gaia mission in 2013. The mission’s overall goal was to discover the history of the Milky Way by mapping out the positions and velocities of one billion stars. The result is kind of like a movie that shows the past and the future of our galaxy.
The mission has released two separate, massive data sets for researchers to work through, with a third data release expected soon. All that data has spawned a stream of studies into our home galaxy.
Recently, the ESA drew attention to five new insights into the Milky Way galaxy. Allof these discoveries directly stemmed from the Gaia spacecraft.
Continue reading “Gaia has Already Given Us 5 New Insights Into the Milky Way”