Science News
Astronomers Discover a Massive Galaxy ‘Shipyard’ in the Distant Universe
Posted Oct 26, 2021
Even galaxies don’t like to be alone. While astronomers have known for a while that galaxies tend to congregate in groups and in clusters, the process of going from formation to friend groups has remained an open question in cosmology.
In a paper published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Journal, an international team of astronomers reports the discovery of objects that appear to be an emerging accumulation of galaxies in the making – known as a protocluster.
“This discovery is an important step toward reaching our ultimate goal: understanding the assembly of galaxy clusters, the most massive structures that exist in the universe,” said Brenda Frye, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and a co-author of the study.
To cite a local analog, the Milky Way, the galaxy that is home to our solar system, belongs to a galaxy cluster known as the Local Group, which in turn is a part of the Virgo supercluster. But what did a supercluster such as Virgo look like 11 billion years ago?
LUCI AO Webpages Revamp Begins
Posted May 13, 2021
As part of the upgrades/improvements to AO at LBTO, the LUCI AO webpages are being reorganized. A new Phase 1 Planning Page is available for diffraction limited AO. These pages are accessible from the sitemap on the righthand sidebar.
That young but already evolved entirely self-made galaxy
Posted Dec 12, 2020
So young and already so evolved: thanks to observations obtained at the Large Binocular Telescope, an international team of researchers coordinated by Paolo Saracco of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF, Italy) was able to reconstruct the wild evolutionary history of an extremely massive galaxy that existed 12 billions years ago, when the Universe was only 1,8 billions years old, less than 13% of the present age. This galaxy, dubbed C1-23152, formed in “just” 500 million years, an incredibly short time to give rise to a mass of about 200 billion suns. To do so, it produced as many as 450 stars per year, more than one per day, a star formation rate almost 300 times higher than the current rate in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The information obtained from this study will be fundamental for galaxy formation models for which the nature of objects such as C1-23152 is still difficult to account for.
The web of the Giant: spectroscopic confirmation of a Large Scale Structure around the z=6.31 quasar SDSS J1030+0524
Posted Oct 01, 2020
Using three of the largest telescopes around the world – namely, the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the W.M. Keck Observatory Telescope – astronomers found a Large Scale Structure made of six galaxies lying around a massive galaxy harboring a supermassive black hole (SMBH), the first time such a close grouping has been seen within the first billion years of the Universe. The finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the center of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes. It supports the theory that black holes can grow quickly within large web-like structures, which contain plenty of gas to fuel them.
