An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes a study on the star VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest in the Milky Way. The SPHERE instrument installed on ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) allowed to obtain very detailed images of this star making it possible to study the dust that surrounds it and the considerable mass it loses in time ejecting it.
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.
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, 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.
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.
