Category Astronomy/Space

The Fornax Galaxy Cluster is one of the closest of such groupings beyond our Local Group of galaxies. This new VLT Survey Telescope image shows the central part of the cluster in great detail. At the lower-right is the elegant barred-spiral galaxy NGC 1365 and to the left the big elliptical NGC 1399. Credit: ESO. Acknowledgement: Aniello Grado and Luca Limatola

Clusters can contain anything between about 100 and 1000 galaxies and can be between about 5 and 30 million light-years across. Galaxy clusters do not come in neatly defined shapes so it is difficult to determine exactly where they begin and end. However, astronomers have estimated that the centre of the Fornax Cluster is in the region of 65 million light-years from Earth...

Caption: The 1917 photographic plate spectrum of van Maanen’s star from the Carnegie Observatories’ archive. The pull-out box shows the strong lines of the element calcium, which are surprisingly easy to see in the century old spectrum. The spectrum is the thin, (mostly) dark line in the center of the image. The broad dark lanes above and below are from lamps used to calibrate wavelength, and are contrast-enhanced in the box to highlight the two “missing” absorption bands in the star. Available here as a standalone image. Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science.

Researchers didn’t know it a year ago, but it turns out that a 1917 image on an astronomical glass plate from the Carnegie Observatories’ collection shows the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun...

An artist’s conception of an exoplanet courtesy of NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech. Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

Planet-hunting is an ongoing process that’s resulting in the discovery of more and more planets orbiting distant stars. New work reports on a technological upgrade for one method of finding planets or confirming other planetary detections. One of the most-popular and successful techniques for finding and confirming planets the radial velocity method. It takes advantage of the fact that the planet’s gravity also affects the star in return. As a result, astronomers are able to detect the tiny wobbles the planet induces as its gravity tugs on the star. Using this method, astronomers have detected hundreds of exoplanets.

For certain kinds of low-mass stars, however, there are limitations to ...

An image of the deep radio map covering the ELAIS-N1 region, with aligned galaxy jets. The image on the left has white circles around the aligned galaxies; the image on the right is without the circles. Credit: Prof Russ Taylor

Deep radio imaging by researchers in the Uni of Cape Town and Uni of the Western Cape, in S Africa revealed supermassive black holes in a region of the distant universe are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction – most likely a result of primordial mass fluctuations in the early universe. The new result is the discovery – for the first time – of an alignment of the jets of galaxies over a large volume of space, via a 3yr deep radio imaging survey of the radio waves coming from a region called ELAIS-N1 using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT).

The ...