Category Astronomy/Space

NASA’s Human Research Program aims to mitigate the harmful effects of the space radiation environment on astronaut health outside of the relative protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Credit: NASA/SOHO

Observations of ‘Jellyfish galaxies’ with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed a previously unknown way to fuel supermassive black holes. It seems the mechanism that produces the tentacles of gas and newborn stars that give these galaxies their nickname also makes it possible for the gas to reach the central regions of the galaxies, feeding the black hole that lurks in each of them and causing it to shine brilliantly. This picture of one of the galaxies, nicknamed JO204, from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, shows clearly how material is streaming out of the galaxy in long tendrils to the lower-left. Red shows the glow from ionised hydrogen gas and the whiter regions are where most of the stars in the galaxy are located...

Illustration shows a likely configuration of a gravitational lensing system discovered by OVRO. The ‘milli-lens’ is located in or near the intervening spiral galaxy. The lens is magnifying blobs of jet material within the active galaxy PKS1413+135, but the blobs are too small to be seen in the radio image (top left), taken by MOJAVE. Only when the blobs move far away from the yellow core do they expand and are visible as the pink blobs in the image. Credit: Anthony Readhead/Caltech/MOJAVE

The cosmic velocity web is represented by surfaces of knots in red and surfaces of filaments in gray. The black lines with arrows illustrate local velocity flows within filaments and toward knots. The Laniakea Supercluster basin of attraction that includes our Milky Way galaxy is represented by a blue surface. The region being displayed extends across one billion light years. Credit: Daniel Pomarede, Yehuda Hoffman, R. Brent Tully and Helene Courtois. Credit: Daniel Pomarede, Yehuda Hoffman, R. Brent Tully, Helene Courtois