Perseus tagged posts

Combined ALMA and VLA image of L1448 IRS3B system. Credit: Bill Saxton, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NRAO/AUI/NSF

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) revealed the process in action.

“This new work directly supports the conclusion that there are two mechanisms that produce multiple star systems – fragmentation of circumstellar disks, such as we see here, and fragmentation of the larger cloud of gas and dust from which young stars are formed,” said John Tobin, of the University of Oklahoma and...

Two images show the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The image on the left shows a close up image of active galaxy NGC 1275, the central, dominant member of the Perseus cluster (credit: Data – Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing – Al Kelly). The image on the right shows the cluster using an X-ray telescope revealing the atmosphere of plasma enveloping the whole galaxy cluster.

Data from a now-defunct X-ray satellite is providing new insights into the complex tug-of-war between galaxies, the hot plasma that surrounds them, and the giant black holes that lurk in their centres. Launched from Japan on February 17, 2016, the Japanese space agency (JAXA) Hitomi X-ray Observatory functioned for just over a month before contact was lost and the craft disintegrated...