Category Astronomy/Space

This image shows the recovered nova of March 11, 1437 and its ejected shell. It was taken with the Carnegie SWOPE 1-meter telescope in Chile using a filter that highlights the hot hydrogen gas of the shell. The now-quiescent star that produced the nova shell is indicated with red tick marks; it is far from the shell’s center today. However, its measured motion across the sky places it at the red ‘+’ in 1437. The position of the center of the shell in 1437 is at the green plus sign. The agreement of the 1437 positions of the shell center and of the old nova are the ‘clock’ that demonstrates that the old nova of 1437 A.D. really is the source of the shell. Credit: © K. Ilkiewicz and J. Mikolajewska

This cartoon shows how gas falling into distant starburst galaxies ends up in vast turbulent reservoirs of cool gas extending 30 000 light-years from the central regions. ALMA has been used to detect these turbulent reservoirs of cold gas surrounding similar distant starburst galaxies. By detecting CH+ for the first time in the distant Universe, this research opens up a new window of exploration into a critical epoch of star formation. Credit: ESO/L. Benassi

The earliest known galaxies in the universe. Some of these galaxies formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. Credit: ESA/NASA

KIPAC scientists have for the first time used artificial neural networks to analyze complex distortions in spacetime, called gravitational lenses, demonstrating that the method is 10 million times faster than traditional analyses. (Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)