Why the Vast Supergalactic Plane is Teeming with Only One Type of Galaxy

Mustia pisteitä ellipsin sisällä, keskiosassa punainen ellipsigalaksi, reunalla sininen kiekkogalaksi.
In the supergalactic plane, which lies on the equator of the picture, galaxies experience frequent interactions and mergers, leading to the formation of massive elliptical galaxies. By contrast, galaxies away from the plane evolve in relative isolation, allowing them to preserve their disk-like structure. (Image: Till Sawala)

Our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a much larger formation, the local Supercluster structure, which contains several massive galaxy clusters and thousands of individual galaxies. Due to its pancake-like shape, which measures almost a billion light years across, it is also referred to as the Supergalactic Plane.

Most galaxies in the universe fall into one of two categories: firstly, elliptical galaxies, made mostly of old stars and containing typically extremel...

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Personalized Cancer Medicine: Humans make Better Treatment Decisions than AI

Organoid model of a tumor. © Ana Cristina Afonseca Pestana
Organoid model of a tumor. Unchecked cell growth and targeted treatments can be simulated in these models. © Ana Cristina Afonseca Pestana

Limits of large language models in precision medicine. Treating cancer is becoming increasingly complex, but also offers more and more possibilities. After all, the better a tumor’s biology and genetic features are understood, the more treatment approaches there are. To be able to offer patients personalized therapies tailored to their disease, laborious and time-consuming analysis and interpretation of various data is required. Researchers at Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now studied whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT can help with this step...

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Research reveals Rare Metal could offer Revolutionary Switch for Future Quantum Devices

Image shows a representation of emergent symmetry, showing a perfectly symmetric water droplet emerging from a layering of snow. The ice crystals in the snow, by contrast, have a complex shape and therefore a lower symmetry than the water droplet. The purple colour denotes the purple bronze material in which this phenomenon was discovered.University of Bristol

Quantum scientists have discovered a rare phenomenon that could hold the key to creating a ‘perfect switch’ in quantum devices which flips between being an insulator and superconductor.

The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in Science, found these two opposing electronic states exist within purple bronze, a unique one-dimensional metal composed of individual conducting chains of atoms.

Tiny changes in...

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‘Triple Star’ Discovery could Revolutionize Understanding of Stellar Evolution

Large ball of light surrounded by blue disc of light and smaller ball of light hovering above
Artist’s impression composed of a star with a disc around it (a Be “vampire” star; foreground) and its companion star that has been stripped of its outer parts (background). Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

A ground-breaking new discovery by University of Leeds scientists could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe.

Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars — until now mainly thought to exist in double stars — could in fact be “triples.”

The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects — a subset of B stars — which are considered an important “test bed” for d...

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