Telescopes

Photographs of the protostar IRAS20126+4104 and its material jets taken in 2012 and 2020 using the FLAO/PISCES and SOUL/LUCI1 instruments

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports a study on the massive protostar cataloged as IRAS20126+4104 which obtained the measurement of the speed of the jets of materials that are ejected at about 100 km/h. A team of researchers led by Fabrizio Massi of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Arcetri used the SOUL instrument installed on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) to obtain the details necessary to measure the displacements that occurred with respect to archive images dating back to 2003 and 2012. This result helps to better understand the formation processes of massive stars.

The star WR 124 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)

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An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows the star WR 124 and the surrounding nebula in never-before-seen detail. This is a case where a star is nearing the end of its life, which could culminate in a supernova. For this reason, astronomers have been keeping an eye on WR 124 for years with various instruments and it was among Webb’s first observation targets in June 2022. The very powerful stellar wind typical of so-called Wolf-Rayet stars caused the loss of this star’s outer layers, which formed the nebula that surrounds it. Its details have now been captured in the breathtaking image thanks to Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments to better understand the processes taking place before the possible supernova or another type of death.

A scheme of the passage from the universe full of neutral hydrogen and dark to the bright one following the epoch of reionization

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the identification of a group of primordial galaxies that could be among the ones that contributed to the reionization of the universe, making it go from dark to bright. A team of researchers coordinated by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics used observations conducted with the James Webb space telescope within the GLASS-JWST program to study 29 very distant and therefore ancient galaxies. The examination of those galaxies’ physical characteristics led the researchers to conclude that 80% of them contributed significantly to reionization.

Image of the Moon captured using a metalens (Image courtesy Xingjie Ni. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nano Letters” reports the demonstration of the possibilities of a telescope equipped with a metalens. A team of researchers produced an 80-millimeter metalens, a structure that has antenna-like surface patterns that focus light to magnify distant objects. Compared to classic lenses, they have the great advantage of being extremely thin.

So far, metalenses have been limited to very small sizes due to manufacturing issues but this study developed a technique to produce 80mm metalenses usable in telescopes. It’s a deep ultraviolet (DUV) photolithography technique of the type used to produce microprocessors adapted to produce metalenses.

The star X3a in its envelope of gas and dust (Image courtesy Florian Peißker)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the discovery of a very young and massive star, cataloged as X3a, in an environment in which it shouldn’t exist, as it orbits Sagittarius A*, or simply Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. A team of researchers led by Florian Peißker of the Institute of Astrophysics at the University of Cologne, Germany, used several instruments to locate X3a.

According to the researchers, the star must have formed in a cloud farther from Sagittarius A* and then been attracted by it. This suggests a model of star formation near an environment where conditions seem impossible.