Galaxies

A cosmic aurora between the Abell 0399 and Abell 0401 galaxy clusters

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An article published in the journal “Science” reports the identification of electromagnetic fields along a filament that crosses the approximately 10 million light years between the Abell 0399 and Abell 0401 galaxy clusters. A team of researchers led by Federica Govoni of the National Institute of Astrophysics, Cagliari, used the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope to carry out for the first time measurement of such a structure in radio waves.

The galaxy NGC 4485 altered by a cosmic clash

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A new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instruments portrays the galaxy NGC 4485. It’s an irregular galaxy, which means that its shape is not among the normal ones for galaxies, a consequence of its passage through a much larger neighbor, NGC 4490, which altered the balance inside it and among other things also started the formation of new stars.

The unexpected brightness of the earliest galaxies in the universe offers clues to a crucial moment in its evolution

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” shows evidence that the oldest galaxies in the universe were brighter than expected. A team of researchers combined observations made with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes of galaxies that formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang and discovered an unexpected infrared brightness. That’s the consequence of the release of ionizing radiation and that can offer new clues to the epoch of reionization, a crucial moment in the history of the universe.

Thousands of images from the Hubble Space Telescope provide a wide view of the universe and its history

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A mosaic of images created by combining 7,500 images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope offers a portrait of a part of the universe containing 265,000 galaxies up to 13.3 billion light years away, which means that we see the most distant of them as they were about 500 million years after the Big Bang. The result was named the Hubble Legacy Field and also combines observations taken from various deep field campaigns of the past years at wavelengths ranging from ultraviolets to near infrareds. It also shows the universe that evolves over time.

The position of quasars varies over time

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports evidence that the position of quasars is not fixed. A team of astrophysicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology combined global observations of 40 quasars between 1994 and 2016 for this study. Based on the fact that the apparent positions of quasars change according to the frequency of the radiation used to observe them, the researchers wanted to verify if that effect could vary over time. Quasars are used as cosmic reference points, knowing their exact location can increase their reliability.