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Category: cosmology – Page 162

Astronomers detected a supermassive black hole only 750 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies from the early universe. Scientists from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona detected the colossal giant using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio observatory in Chile.

Their observations shed new light on the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes and their role in early galaxies.

A supermassive black hole in an extremely active galaxy.

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Astronomers have found the first evidence of the collision course in two dwarf galaxies that are 760 million and 3.2 billion light-years away from Earth.

In a recent astronomical find, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Far out of reach, two sets of dwarf galaxies have recently come together to join in an astronomical dance. One pair resides 760 million light-years away from us here on Earth, while the other is a majestic 3.2 billion light-years distant in the Abell 1758S cluster.

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There is no “blanket of stars.” The night sky we all see has infinite depth. From Earth at night with naked eyes we mostly see the stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but beyond is the entire universe. Using powerful telescopes it can be navigated and known. All you need is a map—and they keep getting better.

This week saw the release of the largest two-dimensional map of the sky ever made. It comes from the tenth data release from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, a six-year survey of nearly half the sky using telescopes at Kitt Peak in Arizona and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The Legacy Surveys— which can be explored online —is designed to create the most comprehensive map of the sky possible to help astronomers understand how the universe has expanded over the last 12 billion years. That’s critical to understanding “dark energy,” an unknown force that appears to be accelerating the universe’s expansion.

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Recently an international collaboration of astronomers released the most accurate map yet of all the matter in the universe, to help to understand dark matter, and now this is being joined by the largest two-dimensional map of the entire sky, which can help in the study of dark energy. A data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey shared the results from six years of scanning almost half of the sky, totaling one petabyte of data from three different telescopes.

The reason that such large-scale data is required to study dark energy and dark matter is that these can only be detected due to their effects on ordinary matter — so researchers need to look at many galaxies to track how these otherwise unseen forces are adding mass or affecting the interaction between galaxies. This particular map was created to help scientists identify 40 million target galaxies which will be studied as part of the DESI Spectroscopic Survey.

To make the map as comprehensive as possible, the researchers included data taken in the near-infrared wavelength as well as the visible light wavelength. That is important as the light from distant galaxies appears redshifted, or shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, due to the expansion of the universe. “The addition of near-infrared wavelength data to the Legacy Survey will allow us to better calculate the redshifts of distant galaxies, or the amount of time it took light from those galaxies to reach Earth,” explained one of the researchers, Alfredo Zenteno of NSF’s NOIRLab, in a statement.

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Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory sited in Chile, the team have determined that the galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1,000 times that of our own Milky Way and containing over a billion worth of . The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its center.

The black hole is considered to be a new type of primordial black hole—one heavily enshrouded by cosmic “dust,” causing nearly all of its light to be emitted in the mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The researchers have also found that this growing supermassive black hole (frequently referred to as an ) is generating a strong jet of material moving at near light speed through the host galaxy.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has made a shocking discovery. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, astronomers have discovered enormous distant galaxies that some say shouldn’t exist. These enormous galaxies are believed to be some of the early galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, and their discovery by Webb has left many scratching their heads in confusion.

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