In our 13.8 billion-year-old universe, most galaxies like our Milky Way form gradually, reaching their large mass relatively late. But a new discovery made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of a massive rotating disk galaxy, seen when the universe was only ten percent of its current age, challenges the traditional models of galaxy formation. This research appears on 20…
Tag: early universe
A universe with oligarchs: Era of reionization likely the work of the most massive, luminous galaxies
The sparsely distributed hot gas found today between galaxies, the intergalactic medium (IGM), is ionized. The early universe started off hot, but then it rapidly expanded and cooled allowing its main constituent, hydrogen, to combine to form neutral atoms. When and how did these neutral atoms become reionized to compose the IGM we see today? Astronomers think that ultraviolet radiation emitted…
ALMA resolves gas impacted by young jets from supermassive black hole
Astronomers obtained the first resolved image of disturbed gaseous clouds in a galaxy 11 billion light-years away by using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The team found that the disruption is caused by young powerful jets ejected from a supermassive black hole residing at the center of the host galaxy. This result will cast light on the mystery of the…
Quasar tsunamis rip across galaxies
Astronomers using the Hubble Telescope found that the region around a quasar’s black hole pushes out material at a few percent the speed of light. These quasar tsunamis wreak havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/quasar-tsunamis-rip-across-galaxies…
Searching for the first stars and galaxies
Astrophysicists, telescopes, supercomputers, and software engineers have joined forces to search for signals from the early Universe. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-03-stars-galaxies.html…
Physicists Think We Might Have a New, Exciting Dark Matter Candidate
Science Alert reports:
The candidate culprit is a recently discovered subatomic particle called a d-star hexaquark. And in the primordial darkness following the Big Bang, it could have come together to create dark matter… explained nuclear physicist Daniel Watts of the University of York in the UK. “Our first calculations indicate that condensates of d-stars are a feasible new candidate for dark…
Black hole from the early universe is blasting us with a powerful jet
A huge black hole from when the universe was less than a billion years old is shooting a powerful jet at Earth, and studying it could help us understand the young cosmos Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2236182-black-hole-from-the-early-universe-is-blasting-us-with-a-powerful-jet/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Neutrinos determined where galaxies formed in the early universe
In the early universe, particles called neutrinos had a starring role in determining where galaxy clusters formed and which elements were created when stars exploded Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2236184-neutrinos-determined-where-galaxies-formed-in-the-early-universe/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
What is a globular cluster?
Globular clusters are spherical collections of up to perhaps a million stars, orbiting mostly in the star halo of spiral galaxies, containing some of a galaxy’s oldest stars. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/definition-what-is-a-globular-cluster…
‘Cosmic String’ Gravitational Waves Could Solve Antimatter Mystery
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Billions of years ago, soon after the Big Bang, cosmic inflation stretched the tiny seed of our universe and transformed energy into matter. Physicists think inflation initially created the same amount of matter and antimatter, which annihilate each other on contact. But then something happened that tipped the scales in favor of…