Astronomy / Astrophysics

The central area of the Milky Way as seen by the Subaru telescope. Several stars are visible in an area about 0.4 light-years across. The star S0-6 is circled in blue while the area where the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* is located is circled in green.

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B, Physical and Biological Sciences” reports a study on the star cataloged as S0-6 which indicates that it formed in another galaxy and only over time reached the center of the Milky Way. Since 2014, a team of researchers led by Shogo Nishiyama of Miyagi University of Education in Japan has been studying various stars that now orbit Sagittarius A*, or simply Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

An artistic illustration of the test of the postquantum theory of classical gravity

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An article published in the journal “Physical Review X (PRX)” proposes what is called a postquantum theory of classical gravity. Professor Jonathan Oppenheim of University College London (UCL) offers a different approach to that adopted by most of his colleagues by proposing to modify quantum theory to unify it with relativistic gravity. An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” offers some reflections from Professor Oppenheim’s former Ph.D. students on the consequences of his theory and proposes an experiment to verify it.

The AzTECC71 galaxy (Image J. McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/The University of Texas at Austin)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a study on AzTECC71, what appears to be a dusty primordial galaxy in which remarkable star formation is taking place. A team of researchers from the COSMOS-Web collaboration led by Jed McKinney of the University of Texas at Austin observed what appeared to be a ghost galaxy with the James Webb Space Telescope. The peculiarity of this study is that AzTECC71 was detected by some ground-based telescopes but didn’t appear to the Hubble Space Telescope. This may be a much more common case than previously thought that requires some sort of ghostbuster to find.

The HH 1177 system

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the identification of a protoplanetary disk around the very young star cataloged as HH 1177 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the dwarf galaxies satellite of the Milky Way. A team of researchers used the ALMA radio telescope to observe the disk in a follow-up study after observations conducted with the MUSE instrument mounted on the VLT allowed to see jets coming from the still-forming star. This is the first detection of a circumstellar disk in another galaxy. That type of structure is also called a Keplerian disk in jargon because it obeys the same laws as planetary motion.

An elliptical galaxy on the left and a spiral galaxy on the right

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” provides an explanation for the scarcity of spiral galaxies in the so-called Supergalactic Plane. A team of researchers used results obtained from the SIBELIUS supercomputer simulation to offer an explanation based on galaxy mergers. The analysis of the results indicates that in galaxy clusters present on the Supergalactic Plane, interactions and mergers are common with the result that spiral galaxies merge to become elliptical galaxies. Far from the Supergalactic Plane, galaxies are more isolated and therefore less likely to merge.