Astronomy / Astrophysics

The early massive galaxies just discovered marked in red circles (Image ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU)

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An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal” describes the discovery of the oldest giant galaxies carried out thanks to ESO’s VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope. A team of astronomers led by Karina Caputi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, identified galaxies that existed when the universe was between 750 million and 2.1 billion years old. This result is surprising because the birth of galaxies so massive wasn’t expected so soon.

Scheme of ALMA combined with the IRAM and VLBA radio telescopes (Image A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF))

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The ALMA radio telescope is currently the world’s most powerful yet in recent months some experiments were carried out that made it even more powerful by working together with other radio telescopes to create a virtual instrument that may have a size similar to that of Earth. This was made possible by combining observations from ALMA with those from other radio telescopes located in other continents.

The galaxy MCG+01-02-015, also known as LEDA 1852 (Photo ESA/Hubble & NASA and N. Grogin (STScI), Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt)

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The galaxy MCG+01-02-015, also known as LEDA 1852, got photographed using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instrument. The special characteristic of this galaxy is that it’s extremely isolated. Generally, galaxies are part of clusters which are in turn part of larger formations, bonded together in structures called galactic filaments, formations at a really huge scale. Among these filaments, however, there are cosmic voids in which sometimes there may be a lonely galaxy.

The Tarantula Nebula with the PSR J0540-6919 and PSR J0537-6910 pulsars circled (Image NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; background: ESO/R. Fosbury (ST-ECF))

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An article published in the journal “Science” describes the study of the first gamma-ray emitting pulsar discovered outside the Milky Way. Cataloged as PSR J0540-6919, it’s part of an area full of stars known as the Tarantula Nebula or 30 Doradus within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The gamma rays emission from this pulsar was identified by the LAT (Large Area Telescope), one of the instruments of the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope.

V774104 (Foto cortesia Subaru Telescope by Scott Sheppard, Chad Trujillo, and David Tholen. Tutti i diritti riservati)

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At the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland, the discovery of a celestial body called for now only V774104 was announced. Using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, a team led by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii discovered what seems the most distant object yet detected in the solar system being about 15.5 billion kilometers (about 9.5 billion miles) from the Sun, about three times Pluto and about 103 times that of Earth.