ESO tagged posts

Brightest and Fastest-Growing: Astronomers Identify Record-Breaking Quasar

Brightest and fastest-growing: astronomers identify record-breaking quasar
This artist’s impression shows the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a supermassive black hole. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, this quasar has been found to be the most luminous object known in the universe to date. The supermassive black hole, seen here pulling in surrounding matter, has a mass 17 billion times that of the sun and is growing in mass by the equivalent of another sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole ever known. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have characterized a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind but also the most luminous object ever observed...

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Furthest Ever Detection of a Galaxy’s Magnetic Field

Located centrally on a dark background is an electric blue donut-shaped blob, showing the orientation of the magnetic field of the distant galaxy. The bright donut is not complete, and there are only two main features. The lines of the magnetic field give it an almost furry texture. The right-hand side of the donut forms a bright, curved banana-like shape. Instead, on the left-hand side, there is another bright region, circular in shape.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected the magnetic field of a galaxy so far away that its light has taken more than 11 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old. The result provides astronomers with vital clues about how the magnetic fields of galaxies like our own Milky Way came to be.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected the magnetic field of a galaxy so far away that its light has taken more than 11 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old. The result provides astronomers with vital clues about how the magnetic fields of galaxies like our own Milky Way came to be.

Lots of...

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‘Smiling cat’ Sh2-284 nebula captured in new image

In the centre of this image is a large cloud, orange and red in colour, which is stretched out over the majority of the frame. The region in the top left of the cloud is particularly vivid. All around the image there are stars, in different colours of white, orange and purple. Some of these are smaller, background stars, whereas others reside in the foreground of the image, such as those in the central cluster of the nebula.
The Sh2-284 nebula, imaged by the VLT Survey Telescope

This cloud of orange and red, part of the Sh2-284 nebula, is shown here in spectacular detail using data from the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). This nebula is teeming with young stars, as gas and dust within it clumps together to form new suns. If you take a look at the cloud as a whole, you might be able to make out the face of a cat, smiling down from the sky.

The Sh2-284 stellar nursery is a vast region of dust and gas and its brightest part, visible in this image, is about 150 light-years (over 1400 trillion kilometers) across. It’s located some 15,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Monoceros.

Nestled in the center of the brightest part of the nebula—right under...

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Extremely Young Galaxy is Milky Way Look-Alike

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Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, have revealed an extremely distant and therefore very young galaxy that looks surprisingly like our Milky Way. The galaxy is so far away its light has taken more than 12 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old. It is also surprisingly unchaotic, contradicting theories that all galaxies in the early Universe were turbulent and unstable. This unexpected discovery challenges our understanding of how galaxies form, giving new insights into the past of our Universe.

Galaxy is distorted, appearing as a ring of light in the sky...

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