Category Astronomy/Space

Image of the inner 3 square degrees of the NGFS survey footprint compared with the size of the Moon. Low surface brightness dwarf galaxies are marked by red circles. Gray circles indicate previously known dwarf galaxies. The dwarf galaxies, which vastly outnumber the bright galaxies, may be the “missing satellites” predicted by cosmological simulations.

The discovery was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Computer simulations of the evolution of the matter distribution in the Universe predict that dwarf galaxies should vastly outnumber galaxies like the Milky Way, with hundreds of low mass dwarf galaxies predicted for every Milky Way-like galaxy...

Space telescope Herschel (2009-2013) allowed fascinating insight into the birth of stars. Credit: ESA

The results are important for space missions that have already been planned, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), for which temps of use < -220 °C are planned, or Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA), for which even lower temps are envisaged.

Space holds numerous fascinating objects which we can only investigate by observing their radiation. For space telescopes such as ESA infrared observatory Herschel, whose mission is to observe radiation in the far-infrared, cooling the instruments is of importance, since the instruments themselves must not emit disturbing infrared radiation...

Astronomers from the University of Cambridge, U.K., have detected a number of narrow streams and diffuse debris clouds around 2 nearby irregular dwarf galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds. The research also implies that one of these dwarf galaxies – the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) could be more massive than previously thought.

“Even though a prominent gaseous stream emanating from the clouds has been known and studied for some time, no obvious stellar streams had been found until recently,” Vasily Belokurov. Belokurov, together with colleague Sergey Koposov, used the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to track down stellar debris on the outskirts of the Magellanic Clouds. They were searching for the Magellanic stellar halo substructure using blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars as tracers...

At the center of this amazing Hubble image is the elliptical galaxy NGC 3610. Surrounding the galaxy are a wealth of other galaxies of all shapes. There are spiral galaxies, galaxies with a bar in their central regions, distorted galaxies and elliptical galaxies, all visible in the background. In fact, almost every bright dot in this image is a galaxy — the few foreground stars are clearly distinguishable due to the diffraction spikes (lines radiating from bright light sources in reflecting telescope images) that overlay their images.

At the center of this amazing Hubble image is the elliptical galaxy NGC 3610. Surrounding the galaxy are a wealth of other galaxies of all shapes...