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    galaxy formation tagged posts

    Hubble Spots Double Quasars in Merging Galaxies

    April 7, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s conception shows the brilliant light of two quasars residing in the cores of two galaxies that are in the chaotic process of merging. The gravitational tug-of-war between the two galaxies stretches them, forming long tidal tails and igniting a firestorm of starbirth. Quasars are brilliant beacons of intense light from the centers of distant galaxies. They are powered by supermassive black holes voraciously feeding on infalling matter. This feeding frenzy unleashes a torrent of radiation that can outshine the collective light of billions of stars in the host galaxy. In a few tens of millions of years, the black holes and their galaxies will merge, and so will the quasar pair, forming an even more massive black hole...
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    Extremely Young Galaxy is Milky Way Look-Alike

    August 14, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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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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    Cosmologists Create Largest Simulation of Galaxy Formation, break their own record

    March 19, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This is a composite which combines gas temperature (as the color) and shock mach number (as the brightness). Red indicates 10 million Kelvin gas at the centers of massive galaxy clusters, while bright structures show diffuse gas from the intergalactic medium shock heating at the boundary between cosmic voids and filaments. Credit: Illustris Team

    This is a composite which combines gas temperature (as the color) and shock mach number (as the brightness). Red indicates 10 million Kelvin gas at the centers of massive galaxy clusters, while bright structures show diffuse gas from the intergalactic medium shock heating at the boundary between cosmic voids and filaments. Credit: Illustris Team

    A multi-institutional team gives the cosmology community a world-class simulation to study how the universe formed. Humans have long tried to explain how stars came to light up the night sky. The wide array of theories throughout history have one common (and correct) governing principle that astrophysicists still use to this day: by understanding the stars and their origins, we learn more about where we come from...

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    Shedding Light on Galaxies’ Rotation Secrets

    July 14, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Image: . Angular Momentum of Early- and Late-type Galaxies: Nature or Nurture? The Astrophysical Journal, 2017; 843 (2): 105 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa7893

    Image: . Angular Momentum of Early- and Late-type Galaxies: Nature or Nurture? The Astrophysical Journal, 2017; 843 (2): 105 DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa7893

    The dichotomy concerns the so-called angular momentum (per unit mass), that in physics is a measure of size and rotation velocity. Spiral galaxies are found to be strongly rotating, with an angular momentum higher by a factor of about 5 than ellipticals. What is the origin of such a difference? An international research team investigated the issue in a study just published in the Astrophysical Journal. The team was led by SISSA Ph.D. student JingJing Shi under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Lapi and Luigi Danese, and in collaboration with Prof. Huiyuan Wang from USTC (Hefei) and Dr. Claudia Mancuso from IRA-INAF (Bologna). The res...
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