Stars

Some galaxies observed in this study, which we see as they were when the universe was 900 million years old

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Three articles published in “The Astrophysical Journal” report various aspects of a study on the epoch of reionization and bring evidence that the first galaxies transformed the universe from an opaque place to the current place where light can spread. Researchers from the EIGER team led by Simon Lilly of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, used the James Webb Space Telescope together with some ground-based telescopes to observe primordial galaxies finding transparent regions around them thanks to the reionization of the gas.

Image that celebrates the discovery of the exoplanet BEBOP-1 c (Image courtesy Amanda Smith / University of Birmingham)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports the discovery of a second circumbinary planet that orbits the two stars that form the BEBOP-1 system. A team of researchers used the HARPS and ESPRESSO spectrographs to find for the first time a circumbinary planet using the radial velocity method. This exoplanet, cataloged as BEBOP-1 c, joins TOI-1338 b, discovered in 2020 thanks to NASA’s TESS space telescope. Estimates indicate that BEBOP-1 c is a gas giant with a mass around 65 times the Earth’s and a year lasting about 215 Earth days.

A part of the galaxy NGC 5068 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team)

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An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows the core and part of a spiral arm of the galaxy NGC 5068. Two instruments, MIRI and NIRCam, were used to examine this barred spiral galaxy, and the various infrared filters allowed to detect an enormous amount of detail among dusty structures and star-forming areas where there are newborn stars still surrounded by shells of gas and dust.

About 20 million light-years from Earth, the galaxy NGC 5068 belongs to the most common class in the universe, spiral galaxies. The presence of a star formation extending from the core in a shape resembling a bar places it in the subclass of the barred spiral galaxies, which probably make up about two-thirds of their class.

The Lupus 3 molecular cloud

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An image captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile shows the star-forming interstellar cloud cataloged as Lupus 3. Full of activity, it contains protostars that are literally breaking out of their cocoon of gas and dust such as HR 5999 and HR 6000, in the center of the image. The light of those very young stars illuminates the reflection nebula cataloged as Bernes 149. This area is in the cosmic neighborhood, so it’s observed all the time, sometimes obtaining breathtaking images of newborn stars and protostars.

The region Lupus 2 (Image ESO/Meingast et al.)

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports an overview of the results of the VISTA Star Formation Atlas (VISIONS) survey, which aimed to observe star formation regions visible from the southern hemisphere. A team of researchers assembled more than one million infrared images captured over five years by ESO’s VISTA telescope in Chile to create an atlas of five stellar nurseries in the cosmic neighborhood. This is one of the surveys focused on star formation processes with the aim of better understanding its various phases.