Category Astronomy/Space

When it comes to measuring how fast the Universe is expanding, the result depends on which side of the Universe you start from. A recent study has calibrated the best cosmic yardsticks to unprecedented accuracy, shedding new light on what’s known as the Hubble tension.

The Universe is expanding — but how fast exactly? The answer appears to depend on whether you estimate the cosmic expansion rate — referred to as the Hubble’s constant, or H0 — based on the echo of the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) or you measure H0 directly based on today’s stars and galaxies. This problem, known as the Hubble tension, has puzzled astrophysicists and cosmologists around the world.

A study carrie...

Gemini North captures sprawling aftermath of head-on colllision between a pair of galaxies. The Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, captured a dazzling image of UGC12914 and UGC312915, which are nicknamed the Taffy Galaxies...

Astronomers have discovered a large reservoir of hot gas in the still-forming galaxy cluster around the Spiderweb galaxy — the most distant detection of such hot gas yet. Galaxy clusters are some of the largest objects known in the Universe and this result further reveals just how early these structures begin to form.

Using the Atacama Large Millimete...

Researchers model how elements move across star-forming regions. Much like how wind plays a key role in life on Earth by sweeping seeds, pollen and more from one place to another, galactic winds — high-powered streams of charged particles and gases — can change the chemical makeup of the host galaxies they form in, simply by blowing in a specific direction.

Using observations made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new study details how these energetic winds, once released from the center of a galaxy, directly influence the temperature and metal distribution of the rest of the region.

“Galactic winds are a large part of galaxy evolution in general,” said Sebastian Lopez, lead author of the study and a graduate...