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    Category Astronomy/Space

    From Platypus to Parsecs and MilliCrab: Why do Astronomers use such Weird Units?

    April 19, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A bright, multi-coloured supernova remnant with dusty, wispy filaments and something resembling a tornado (the pulsar wind nebula) in the centre.
    Image of the Crab Nebula where red is radio from the Very Large Array, yellow is infra-red from the Spitzer Space Telescope, green is visible from the Hubble Space Telescope, and blue and purple are X-ray from the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray Observatories respectively. NASA, ESA, G. Dubner (IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires) et al.; A. Loll et al.; T. Temim et al.; F. Seward et al.; VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF; Chandra/CXC; Spitzer/JPL-Caltech; XMM-Newton/ESA; and Hubble/STScI

    You may have heard about an asteroid set to fly near Earth that is the size of 18 platypus, or maybe the one that’s the size of 33 armadillos, or even one the size of 22 tuna fish.

    These outlandish comparisons are the invention of Jerusalem Post journalist Aaron Reich (who bills himself as “creator of the giraffe...

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    PSR J0901-4046 is the Most Magnetized Radio Pulsar known, study finds

    April 18, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    PSR J0901-4046 is the most magnetized radio pulsar known, study finds
    The background for both images shows the 1.28 GHz radio continuum emission from the nebula surrounding the high-mass X-ray binary system Vela X-1, and its newly-discovered radio bow shock (van den Eijnden et al. 2022). On the left and right we can see the MeerKAT images of the pulsar PSR J0901-4046 before and during a pulse, respectively. Credit: Ian Heywood.

    Astronomers have investigated an ultraslow radio pulsar known as PSR J0901-4046, finding that it has an extremely high magnetic field—at a level of 30 quadrillion Gauss. The discovery, published April 7 in Physical Review D, makes PSR J0901-4046 the most magnetized radio pulsar known to date.

    Extraterrestrial sources of radiation with a regular periodicity, known as pulsars, are usually detected in the form of short bursts of...

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    Webb captures the Spectacular Galactic Merger Arp 220

    April 18, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Webb captures the spectacular galactic merger Arp 220
    Credit: IMAGE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

    Shining like a brilliant beacon amidst a sea of galaxies, Arp 220 lights up the night sky in this view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Actually two spiral galaxies in the process of merging, Arp 220 glows brightest in infrared light, making it an ideal target for Webb. It is an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG) with a luminosity of more than a trillion suns. In comparison, our Milky Way galaxy has a much more modest luminosity of about ten billion suns.

    Located 250 million light-years away in the constellation of Serpens, the Serpent, Arp 220 is the 220th object in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. It is the nearest ULIRG and the brightest of the three galactic mergers closest to Earth.

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    James Webb Space Telescope Images Challenge Theories of how Universe Evolved

    April 18, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Six candidate galaxies
    Images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/I. Labbe

    Astronomers find that six of the earliest and most massive galaxy candidates observed by the James Webb Space Telescope so far appear to have converted nearly 100% of their available gas into stars, a finding at odds with the reigning model of cosmology.

    The JWST appears to be finding multiple galaxies that grew too massive too soon after the Big Bang, if the standard model of cosmology is to be believed.

    In a study published in Nature Astronomy, Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an associate professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, finds that six of the earliest and most massive galaxy candidates observed by JWST so far stand to contradict the preva...

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