Category Astronomy/Space

The Cosmic Snake is the image of a distant galaxy, deflected by a strong gravitational lens. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, A.Cava

Asronomers have studied the image of a distant galaxy, 6 billion light-years away from us, warped and stretched by strong gravitational lensing into the shape of a cosmic snake. We have a fair understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that regulate star formation in galaxies, from the interstellar matter to the diffuse clouds distributed in space, whose gravitational contraction leads to the birth of stars within large stellar clusters. But observations of distant galaxies have questioned this picture, the size and mass of these distant stellar nurseries largely exceeding that of their local counterparts...

The Perseus galaxy cluster, located about 240 million light-years away, is shown in this composite of visible light (green and red) and near-infrared images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Unseen here is a thin, hot, X-ray-emitting gas that fills the cluster. Credit: Robert Lupton and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Consortium

Thanks to an in-depth look into the composition of gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, Japan’s Hitomi mission has given scientists new insights into the stellar explosions that formed its chemical elements. Before its brief mission ended unexpectedly in March 2016, Japan’s Hitomi X-ray observatory captured exceptional information about the motions of hot gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster...

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton; ESA Herschel; ESO APEX; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); D. Riechers

Pair of exceptionally rare hyper-luminous galaxies discovered with ALMA. have uncovered the never-before-seen close encounter between two astoundingly bright and spectacularly massive galaxies in the early universe. These so-called hyper-luminous starburst galaxies are exceedingly rare at this epoch of cosmic history – near the time when galaxies first formed – and may represent one of the most-extreme examples of violent star formation ever observed.

Astronomers captured these 2 interacting galaxies, collectively known as ADFS-27, as they began the gradual process of merging into a single, massive elliptical galaxy...

VLA 9 GHz image of GX 1+4. The black cross shows the most accurate position of GX 1+4, from 2MASS (nearinfrared), which is accurate to 0.1 arcsec. The half-power contour of the synthesized beam is shown in the bottom left corner. Credit: Van den Eijnden et al., 2017.

Using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), an international group has detected radio emissions from the accreting X-ray pulsar and symbiotic X-ray binary system designated GX 1+4. It is the first discovery of radio emissions from a symbiotic X-ray binary and the first indication of a jet from an accreting X-ray pulsar with a strong magnetic field.

Discovered in 1970, GX 1+4 is an accreting X-ray pulsar some 14,000 light years away with a relatively long rotation period of about 120 seconds...