February 2023

The galaxy NGC 7496 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Lee (NOIRLab), A. Pagan (STScI))

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A special issue of “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” contains a series of articles reporting the first results of the PHANGS–JWST survey. More than one hundred researchers from the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) Collaboration used the James Webb Space Telescope to examine the galaxies M74, NGC 7496, IC 5332, NGC 1365, and NGC 1433. In particular, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) made it possible to observe structures within those galaxies in previously unseen detail. The information gathered is valuable for reconstructing star formation processes and the influence they have on the gas surrounding protostars and newborn stars.

The results of the observations of the quasar NRAO 530 produced using the various methods to processed the data

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the study of the quasar NRAO 530 conducted within the EHT (Event Horizon Telescope) project, which uses a combination of radio telescopes around the world to obtain images of areas around supermassive black holes. In this case, these are the innermost areas of NRAO 530, where gas and dust are heated to the point of generating strong electromagnetic emissions. About 7.5 billion light-years from the Earth, it’s the farthest supermassive black hole observed so far by the EHT project. The new details obtained on the structures present in this quasar’s central region are useful to understand the processes taking place in that extreme environment.

The trio SDSSCGB 10189 (Image ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun)

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An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a trio of interacting galaxies. Cataloged as SDSSCGB 10189, the trio is a rare case of three massive, star-forming galaxies less than 50,000 light-years apart. At a galactic level, that’s a very short distance, and that’s why their shape is already distorting.

Galaxy mergers are an important topic of astronomical research and in this case, SDSSCGB 10189 is also an object of study for research on the origins of the so-called Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs), the brightest within their clusters and also the most massive.

The results of some reconstructions of J1135's shape obtained starting from the detections conducted with the ALMA radio telescope in different electromagnetic frequencies

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the characterization of the galaxy HATLASJ113526.2-01460, or simply J1135, which we see as it was about two billion years after the Big Bang. So far, the problem was actually being able to resolve their characteristics and now a team led by Professor Andrea Lapi used observations conducted with the ALMA radio telescope to obtain this result. ALMA’s power and sensitivity made it possible to detect even the very weak radio and submillimeter emissions, which might be the only ones that reach us from J1135 due to the considerable presence of interstellar dust within it. These observations help to better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies in the young universe.