When someone says “Milky Way,” do you think of the starry pathway across our sky, or of the great pinwheel-shaped galaxy in space? Both are correct! Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-the-milky-way-galaxy…
Tag: gas clouds
JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields
Astronomers announced this month that a new deep-field survey called JADES will be carried out with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s much-anticipated successor. The Webb is due to launch later this year. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/jades-deep-field-surveys-epoch-of-1st-galaxies…
6 space missions to look forward to in 2021
Here are some of the space missions to keep an eye out for in 2021. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/6-space-missions-2021-artemis-chandrayaa3-jameswebb…
The Large Magellanic Cloud, our galactic neighbor
The Large Magellanic Cloud is a petite galaxy visible with the unaided eye – all year round – for those in the Southern Hemisphere. This small neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way is somewhere between spiral and irregular in shape. Source: https://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/the-large-magellanic-cloud…
C1-23152: An ancient galaxy that built itself
A popular theory of galaxy formation suggests that small galaxies merged to form larger ones. But galaxy C1-23152 – 12 billion light-years from Earth – apparently formed itself from gas in the early universe, via exceedingly rapid star formation. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/c1-23152-galaxy-built-itself-not-via-galaxy-merger…
Astronomers’ success: Seven new cosmic masers
A group of astronomers from Toruń in Poland have successfully completed a survey of the Milky Way plane. They searched for gas clouds, where there was a maser reinforcement of the OH molecule. They saw seven new sources – each of them brings scientists closer to the process by which massive stars are born. “It is like listening to the buzzing…
From star to solar system: How protoplanetary rings form in primordial gas clouds
Four-hundred fifty light-years from Earth, a young star is glowing at the center of a system of concentric rings made from gas and dust, and it is producing planets, one for each gap in the ring. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-09-star-solar-protoplanetary-primordial-gas.html…
The cosmic commute towards star and planet formation
The molecular gas in galaxies is organized into a hierarchy of structures. The molecular material in giant molecular gas clouds travels along intricate networks of filamentary gas lanes towards the congested centers of gas and dust where it is compressed into stars and planets, much like the millions of people commuting to cities for work around the world. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-07-cosmic-commute-star-planet-formation.html…
Inferring the temperature structure of circumstellar disks from polarized emission
Polarized light is a familiar phenomenon because the scattering or reflection of light results in one of its two components being preferentially absorbed. The majority of sunlight on Earth, for example, is preferentially polarized due to scattering in the atmosphere (this helps make polarized sunglasses effective). Electromagnetic radiation from astrophysical sources can also be polarized, typically because of scattering from elongated…
Mysterious Radio Bursts Reveal Missing Matter in Cosmos
sciencehabit writes: Roughly half of the “normal” matter in the universe — the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and even us — exists as mere wisps of material floating in intergalactic space, according to cosmologists. But astronomers had no good way to confirm that, until now. A new study has used fast radio bursts (FRBs) — powerful millisecondslong pulses of…