photometry tagged posts

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers racing to find some of the earliest galaxies ever glimpsed have now confirmed that a galaxy first detected last summer is in fact among the earliest ever found. The findings are published in the journal Nature.

Follow-up observations since first detection of Maisie’s galaxy have revealed that it is from 390 million years after the Big Bang...

This false-color image from a sub-millimeter interferometric telescope shows the circumstellar disk of gas and dust that surrounds star CI Tau. Credit: Stephane Guilloteau/University of Bordeaux

Jupiter-like ‘CI Tau b’ orbits 2 million-year-old star in constellation Taurus. In contradiction to the long-standing idea that larger planets take longer to form, US astronomers today announced the discovery of a giant planet in close orbit around a star so young that it still retains a disk of circumstellar gas and dust.

“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said Christopher Johns-Krull. “That’s been called into question over the past decade” CI Tau b is at least 8X larger than Jupiter, ~450 light years from Earth...

This colorful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO

Globular clusters have for a long time been considered as formed of stars with similar initial chemical composition, but recently, increasing evidence has emerged regarding their more complex nature. NGC 6362 lies 25,000 light years away in the constellation Ara. It is ~13.5 billion years old and at a mass of ~50,000 solar masses, it is the least massive globular cluster with multiple detected photometric stellar populations that have different chemical abundances.

To determine the chemical composition of NGC 6362, the team used the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) mounted on one of ...