The first detection of a fast radio burst inside the Milky Way leads scientists back to a magnetar, partially solving a long-standing mystery. CNET reports: Sifting through a trove of radio telescope data in 2007, Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University, spotted something unusual. Data obtained six years earlier showed a brief, energetic burst, lasting no more than 5…
Tag: intergalactic
Are the Best Star Wars Stories Now in Games Like ‘Star Wars: Squadrons’?
A game critic for the Los Angeles Times remembers his reaction to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “What a disappointment — if only it had been built for video game consoles.” This leads to this epiphany:
For all the deserved attention “The Mandalorian” series on Disney+ has received, the just-released game “Star Wars: Squadrons” reminds us that some of the best…
What is interstellar space?
You might be surprised to learn that interstellar space isn’t just vacuum. It’s full of gases, elements, and dust – very thinly spread, to be sure – but the building blocks of stars and planets. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-what-is-interstellar-space…
Astronomers discover South Pole Wall, a gigantic structure stretching 1.4 billion light years across
Strands in the intergalactic web Source: https://www.livescience.com/south-pole-wall-discovered-in-space.html
Discovery of a luminous galaxy reionizing the local intergalactic medium 13 billion years ago
Astronomers have discovered a luminous galaxy caught in the act of reionizing its surrounding gas only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The research, led by Romain Meyer, Ph.D. student at UCL in London, UK, has been presented today at the virtual annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS). Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-07-discovery-luminous-galaxy-reionizing-local.html…
A monster quasar in the early universe
Astronomers just announced the most massive quasar yet known in the early universe. Its monster central black hole has a mass equivalent to 1.5 billion of our suns. The object has been given a Hawaiian name, Poniua’ena. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/poniuaena-monster-quasar-in-early-universe…
Has mystery of universe’s missing matter been solved?
Cosmologists have only been able to find half the matter that should exist in the universe. With the discovery of a new astronomical phenomenon and new telescopes, these researchers say they’ve just found the rest. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/cosmic-bursts-unveil-universe-missing-matter-mystery…
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…
South Africa’s MeerKAT solves mystery of ‘X-galaxies’
Many galaxies far more active than the Milky Way have enormous twin jets of radio waves extending far into intergalactic space. Normally these go in opposite directions, coming from a massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. However, a few are more complicated and appear to have four jets forming an ‘X’ on the sky. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-south-africa-meerkat-mystery-x-galaxies.html…
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…