Category Astronomy/Space

While observing a newly-dormant galaxy using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), scientists discovered that it had stopped forming stars not because it had used up all of its gas but because most of its star-forming fuel had been thrown out of the system as it merged with another galaxy. The result is a first for ALMA scientists. What’s more, if proven common, the results could change the way scientists think about galaxy mergers and deaths. The results of the research are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

As galaxies move through the Universe, they sometimes encounter other galaxies. As they interact, each galaxy’s gravity pulls on the other...

Simple simulation accidentally leads to X-shaped galaxy for first time. When astronomers use radio telescopes to gaze into the night sky, they typically see elliptical-shaped galaxies, with twin jets blasting from either side of their central supermassive black hole. But every once in a while — less than 10% of the time — astronomers might spot something special and rare: An X-shaped radio galaxy, with four jets extending far into space.

Although these mysterious X-shaped radio galaxies have confounded astrophysicists for two decades, a new Northwestern University study sheds new insight into how they form — and its surprisingly simple. The study also found that X-shaped radio galaxies might be more common than previously thought.

The study will be published on Aug...

An international team of astronomers led by members of the Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) and Department of Physics at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), have discovered a rare celestial jewel-a so-called Planetary Nebula (PN) inside a 500 million-year-old Galactic...

NASA this week shared an audio clip on social media that allows you to “hear” a black hole.
No surprise, the sound is terrifying.

NASA Exoplanets, a team at the agency focused on planets and other information outside of our solar system, tweeted the 34-second clip on Sunday and said there’s a “misconception” that there is no sound in space.

But they explained that “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole.”

NASA initially released the so-called “sonification” earlier this year, explaining that researchers have “associated” the black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster with sound since 2003.

“This is because astronomers discovered that pressure wave...