An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of star formation regions where the percentage of massive stars is much higher compared to others. A team of astronomers led by Zhi-Yu Zhang of the University of Edinburgh used the ALMA radio telescope to study four very old dusty galaxies of the starburst type, meaning where there’s a high star formation rate.
An image published by ESO shows the Tarantula Nebula along with the neighboring areas in their details. A team of astronomers used the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in Chile, to capture unseen details of star clusters, bright gas clouds and supernova remnants scattered around. It’s the sharpest image ever obtained of that region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite dwarf galaxies.
An image published by ESO and ALMA collaboration shows the center of the galaxy NGC 5643 obtained by combining observations made with the ALMA radio telescope with archive data of the MUSE instrument, mounted on ESO’s VLT. In this way it was possible to see beyond the clouds of dust and gas that obscure it even though it’s an active galactic nucleus with strong electromagnetic emissions generated by the activity of the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 5643.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of the most distant traces of oxygen ever detected. A team of astronomers used the ALMA radio telescope and ESO’s VLT telescope to observe the galaxy MACS1149-JD1, where there are traces of star formation about 250 million years after the Big Bang, a very remote era in which so far there were just some clues of possible star formation.
Two articles, one published in the journal “Nature” and one in the journal “Astrophysical Journal”, describe the observations of the merger among various starburst galaxies, characterized by a remarkable production of stars. Two teams, led by Tim Miller of Dalhousie University in Canada and Yale University in the USA, and Iván Oteo of the Scottish University of Edinburgh used the ALMA and APEX radio telescopes to study these events which are very ancient as they happened about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
