This could be the first step to studying the oldest explosions in the universe.
Category: cosmology – Page 251
Dark matter behavior may conflict with our best theory of the universe
New research shows a direct interaction between dark matter particles and those that make up ordinary matter.
A new paper, published in the *Astronomy and Astrophysics* journal, discovered unexpected characteristics for the elusive dark matter that likely goes against our best theory of the universe — the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model.
What is dark matter?
James Webb breaks its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed
We’re only days into James Webb’s scientific operations, and the giant infrared observatory has already broken its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed.
Last week, a team unearthed an observation of a galaxy that existed 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis revealed a galaxy a mere 235 million years after the Big Bang. It is located 35 billion light-years away from Earth.
James Webb peers further into the universe than ever before
The researchers behind the new discovery, from the University of Edinburgh, compiled a catalog of early galaxies observed by Webb to investigate the luminosity function of galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang. They hadn’t actually planned to observe the most distant galaxy known to humans, so the new finding was a happy accident.
Amazing James Webb image looks like a wormhole
Early data from the James Webb Space Telescope is already starting to come in, with exciting finds like views of Jupiter and a potential sighting of the most distant galaxy ever observed. But there’s a lot more Webb data being shared, and much of it is publicly available through the Space Telescope Science Institute’s MAST archive. That means enterprising astronomers are already digging through James Webb data to perform their own analyses, and have created some amazing visuals.
Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, composed and shared this incredible and faintly terrifying image on Twitter. It shows the galaxy Messier 74, captured in the mid-infrared range by Webb’s MIRI instrument as part of the PHANGS-JWST project.
“Let’s just see what JWST observed yesterday …” Brammer wrote on Twitter. Then, echoing all of our sentiments, “Oh, good god.”
Astronomers find ‘Goldilocks’ black hole
Last year, scientists used gravitational waves to detect an elusive intermediate-mass black hole for the first time. Now, Australian astronomers have spotted another – this time using gamma-ray bursts.
Black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. But they aren’t all the same – stellar mass black holes are small, just a few times the mass of our Sun, while supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxy are enormous, with masses millions or even billions of times greater than our sun.
Intermediate mass black holes are the missing link between these two populations, thought to span between 100 and 100,000 solar masses. The black hole discovered in 2020 was 142 solar masses – while this newly discovered monster is on the other end of the scale, at approximately 55,000 solar masses.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope
It’s estimated that about 100 million black holes roam around our Milky Way Galaxy — and for the first time ever, astronomers now believe they may have precisely measured the mass of an isolated black hole with Hubble.
Roaming black holes are born from rare, monstrous stars that are at least 20 times more massive than our Sun. After these stars explode in a supernova, the remnant core is crushed by gravity into a black hole. Because this self-detonation isn’t perfectly symmetrical, the black hole might get “kicked” and careen through our galaxy.
Astronomers believe that the isolated black hole measured by Hubble is traveling across the Milky Way at 100,000 miles per hour (160,000 kph). That’s fast enough to get from Earth to the Moon in less than three hours!
Read more about this discovery: https://go.nasa.gov/3mx6t6p.
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