Astronomy / Astrophysics

The area cataloged as Sagittarius C

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An image captured with the James Webb Space Telescope shows a star-forming area cataloged as Sagittarius C just 300 light-years away from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. In the heart of the galaxy, among half a million stars, there’s a cluster of protostars in the middle of a cloud so dense that the stars behind it are obscured even to the most powerful existing telescope. In contrast, protostars are visible to the NIRCam instrument in detail along with cosmic features that were previously unknown and astronomers have yet to identify.

The star R Leporis as seen by the ALMA radio telescope

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the results of observations of the star R Leporis conducted using the ALMA radio telescope with its receivers at their highest frequencies and an antenna array configuration spread over an area with a diameter of 16 kilometers. R Leporis, or simply R Lep, is a so-called carbon star, a red giant whose atmosphere is particularly rich in carbon in a phase in which oxygen is normally in greater quantities. Unprecedented observations made it possible to detect details of a natural maser around a star that is reaching the end of its life.

The galaxy cluster Abell 2744 and in the insets the galaxies UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12.

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports confirmations of two primordial galaxies studied within the UNCOVER survey. A team of researchers examined spectroscopic detections obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRSpec instrument to obtain good estimates of the distance to the galaxies UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12. These are follow-up observations that exploited the gravitational lens generated by the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster. According to the estimates, UNCOVER z-13 is approximately 13.51 billion light-years away while UNCOVER z-12 is approximately 13.48 billion light-years away.

The Perseus galaxy cluster (Image ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

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ESA has presented the first official images captured by its Euclid space telescope. After some delays due to problems with the fine guidance sensor, it was possible to calibrate Euclid’s instruments and obtain the extraordinary precision of observations necessary for its mission. The result is a resolution that allows a quantity of detail never seen before to be included in the images, be it galaxies, stars, or other objects, often discovered by Euclid. The presentation showed the results both with distant objects such as the Perseus galaxy cluster and with others close in astronomical terms such as the Horsehead Nebula.

galaxy UHZ1 as seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy”, one published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”, and one submitted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” report different aspects of the study of the most distant black hole detected at X-rays. Different teams of researchers combined data obtained with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope to study the galaxy UHZ1 in X-ray and infrared light. The result is the discovery of a growing supermassive black hole approximately 470 million years after the Big Bang. The study offers evidence that it was born already having considerable mass, confirming that supermassive black holes grow from seeds that form from the direct collapse of enormous amounts of gas.