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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Webb captures Stellar Gymnastics in the Cartwheel Galaxy

    August 3, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A large pink, speckled galaxy resembling a wheel with with a small, inner oval, with dusty blue in between on the right, with two smaller spiral galaxies about the same size to the left against a black background.
    Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has peered into the chaos of the Cartwheel Galaxy, revealing new details about star formation and the galaxy’s central black hole. Webb’s powerful infrared gaze produced a detailed image of the Cartwheel and two smaller companion galaxies against a backdrop of many other galaxies. The image provides a new view of how the Cartwheel Galaxy has changed over billions of years.

    The Cartwheel Galaxy, located about 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is a rare sight...

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    A Fast-moving Star is Colliding with Interstellar Gas, creating a spectacular Bow Shock

    August 2, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A multi-wavelength view of Zeta Ophiuchi. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Dublin Inst. Advanced Studies/S. Green et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/Spitzer

    Zeta Ophiuchi has had an interesting life. It began as a typical large star about twenty times more massive than the sun. It spent its days happily orbiting a large companion star until its companion exploded as a supernova about a million years ago. The explosion ejected Zeta Ophiuchi, so now it is speeding away through interstellar space. Of course, the supernova also expelled the outer layers of the companion star, so rather than empty space, our plucky star is speeding through the remnant gas as well. As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. And that’s great news for astronomers, as a recent study shows.

    Zeta Ophiuchi is most famous for be...

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    Improved Model for the Mass Distribution of Galaxy Cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327 based on Webb Telescope image

    August 1, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    James Webb Telescope reveals highly distant galaxies
    This JWST image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327 with a large number of lensed background galaxies. The white bar at the bottom corresponds to 50 arcsec, which is approximately the maximum size of Jupiter observed from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI

    Using the first science image released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) this month, an international team of scientists with significant contribution from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has built an improved model for the mass distribution of the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327. Acting as a so-called gravitational lens, the foreground galaxy cluster produces both multiple images of background galaxies and magnifies these images...

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    Space study offers Clearest Understanding yet of the Lifecycle of Supermassive Black Holes

    July 27, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A supermassive black hole
    Supermassive black holes can be obscured by a doughnut-shaped ring of dust and gas, known as a “torus.” (Photo by ESA/NASA, the AVO project and Paolo Padovani)

    Black holes with varying light signatures but that were thought to be the same objects being viewed from different angles are actually in different stages of the life cycle, according to a study led by Dartmouth researchers.

    The research on black holes known as “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs, says that it definitively shows the need to revise the widely used “unified model of AGN” that characterizes supermassive black holes as all having the same properties.

    The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, provides answers to a nagging space mystery and should allow researchers to create more pre...

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