Distant Universe

[Ahhzz]

saw that earlier this week, tried to find a good pic of it, to post up here, and got distracted by a server failure :/ thx Drone

 

[Drone]

 

[Drone]

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly discovered the most distant cosmic magnifying glass, produced by a monster elliptical galaxy located 9.6 billion ly away. "Lensing" galaxies are so massive that their gravity bends, magnifies, and distorts light from objects behind them (gravitational lensing).
The object behind the cosmic lens is a tiny spiral galaxy located 10.7 billion ly away. It's undergoing a rapid burst of star formation.

 

[Drone]

Astronomers found extremely distant galaxy using the lensing power of the mammoth galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster) which produced three magnified images of the same faint galaxy. Each magnified image makes the galaxy appear 10 times larger and brighter. The diminutive object is estimated to be >13 billion ly away.

This galaxy is an example of what is suspected to be an abundant, underlying population of extremely small, faint objects that existed ~ 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy measures merely 850 ly across - 500 times smaller than Milky Way - and is estimated to have a mass of only 40 million suns. The Milky Way, in comparison, has a stellar mass of a few hundred billion suns. And the galaxy forms about one star every three years, whereas the Milky Way galaxy forms roughly one star per year. However, given its small size and low mass, the tiny galaxy actually is rapidly evolving and efficiently forming stars.

NASA

 

[Drone]

A newly discovered galaxy cluster Gioiello is the most massive one ever detected with an age of 800 million years or younger.
Astronomers determined that the Gioiello Cluster lies ~ 9.6 billion ly away and contains a whopping 400 trillion times the mass of the Sun.

 

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Caltech astronomers detect the farthest galaxy

Faint galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than 13.2 billion years old (at a redshift of 8.68).

EGS8p7, which is unusually luminous, may be powered by a population of unusually hot stars, and it may have special properties that enabled it to create a large bubble of ionized hydrogen much earlier than is possible for more typical galaxies at these times

 

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Astronomers have generated the most accurate statistical description yet of faint, early galaxies as they existed in the universe 500 million years after the Big Bang

When all the stars and galaxies are masked, the background signals can be isolated, as seen in the second and third panels. The middle one reveals “intrahalo light” from rogue stars torn from their host galaxies, and the panel on the right captures the signature of the first galaxies formed in the universe

Scientists separate noise from the faint signal associated with first galaxies by looking at the variations in the intensity from one pixel to another.

 

[Drone]

Amazing discovery!

Galaxy cluster SpARCS1049+56, has at least 27 galaxy members, and a combined mass equal to nearly 400 trillion suns. It is located 9.8 billion ly away in the Ursa Major constellation.

A smaller galaxy seems to have recently merged with the monster galaxy in the middle of the cluster, lending its gas to the larger galaxy and igniting a fury of new stars (~ 860 new ones a year!!!). For reference, our Milky Way makes only about 1-2 stars per year.

 

[Drone]

Unrelated but great lecture

 

[Drone]

I don't even know what to say and what can I say anyway it's just so .. ... Maaaan

Astronomers have discovered a Massive Overdense Object (MOO J1142+1527) in a very remote part of the universe, thanks to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE. The galaxy cluster, located 8.5 billion ly away, is the most massive structure yet found at such great distances.

The cluster's mass is a quadrillion times that of our sun - making it the most massive known cluster that far back in space and time.


"Based on our understanding of how galaxy clusters grow from the very beginning of our universe, this cluster should be one of the five most massive in existence at that time," said co-author Peter Eisenhardt, the project scientist for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The red galaxies at the center of the image make up the heart of the galaxy cluster.

 

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PKS 0637-752 is 6 billion ly away. It is a luminous quasar that radiates with the power of 10 trillion suns from a region smaller than our solar system. The source of this prodigious energy is believed to be a supermassive black hole. (Chandra took that image in 1999)

Astrosat's Soft X-ray Telescope sees PKS 2155-304, a special type of quasar. The targeted object is an X-ray source, belonging to an enigmatic class of supermassive black holes in a galaxy 1.5 billion ly away.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Astrosat's Soft X-ray Telescope

Something to be celebrated

India's first satellite dedicated to astronomical observations, saw its first light from an astronomical source on Oct. 26, 2015, after the camera door was opened at 06:30UT. The telescope door covering the optics had already been opened 10 days earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrosat

VID which is worth a watch....less than 2 mins
http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/astrosat-india-s-own-observatory-launched-into-space/384680

 

[Drone]

Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram

Pay attention to every detail in this 55 min awesomeness

 

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ESO's VISTA survey telescope has spied 574 previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have for the first time found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.

UltraVISTA has been imaging the patch of sky, ~ 4 times the size of a full Moon, since December 2009. This is the largest patch of sky ever imaged to these depths at infrared wavelengths.

“We found no evidence of these massive galaxies earlier than around 1 billion years after the Big Bang, so we're confident that this is when the first massive galaxies must have formed,” concludes Henry Joy McCracken, a co-author on the paper.

In addition, the astronomers found that massive galaxies were more plentiful than had been thought. Galaxies that were previously hidden make up half of the total number of massive galaxies present when the Universe was between 1.1 and 1.5 billion years old.


Download giant image (283 MB)

 

[Drone]

MACS J0717.5+3745 is a group of galaxies, one of the largest and most complex known with the equivalent of > 10 000 Milky Way-sized galaxies. It's located ~ 5 billion ly away.

Astronomers used the Jansky Very Large Array to hunt for lensed radio sources in this cluster, and detected 51 compact galaxies - seven whose light seems to be magnified by the cluster by more than factor of two and as much as a factor of nine. The scientists infer from the radio fluxes that most of these seven are forming new stars at a modest rate, 10-50 per year, and date from an epoch ~ 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Two are also detected in X-rays by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and so host AGN, each one radiating about as much light in X-rays as a billion Suns. The two AGN are interesting in themselves, but finding them both in this one region suggests that, like bright star forming galaxies, these AGN were more common back then too.

 

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An international team of scientists using a combination of radio and optical telescopes identified the distant location of a fast radio burst (FRB) for the first time. This discovery has allowed them to confirm the current cosmological model of the distribution of matter in the Universe.

Looking at CMBR, modern satellite observatories like COBE, WMAP and Planck have gradually refined our understanding of the composition of the universe, and the most recent measurements suggest it consists of 4.9% normal matter [baryons], whereas 26.8% is 'dark matter', and 68.3% is the even more mysterious 'dark energy'.

The team members from UTokyo, NAOJ, and Konan University next examined an optical image of the FRB 150418 taken a day after the first flash by the NAOJ's 8.2-m Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. The image revealed a possible source: an elliptical galaxy ~ 6 billion ly away.

 

[Drone]

I've added a link and video to the post above


More interesting news:

Cosmic voids could contain as much as 20% of the 'normal' matter in the cosmos. Galaxies are located in filaments that make up a 'cosmic web'.

Illustris is a large computer simulation of the evolution and formation of galaxies, to measure the mass and volume of these filaments and the galaxies within them. It simulates a cube of space in the Universe, measuring some 350 million ly on each side.

When the astronomers looked at the data, they found that ~ 50% of the total mass of the Universe is in the places where galaxies reside, compressed into a volume of 0.2% of the Universe we see, and a further 44% is in the enveloping filaments. Just 6% is located in the voids, which make up 80% of the volume. But they also found that a surprising fraction of normal matter - 20% - is likely to be have been transported into the cosmic voids. The culprit appears to be the supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies.

This slab cut from the cube generated by the Illustris simulation shows the distribution of normal matter.

The same slice of data, this time showing the distribution of dark matter.



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More Distant Universe related news:

Astronomers have discovered a large area of diffuse emission [radio halo], estimated to be ~ 3 million ly wide. The newly detected halo is located in a distant massive merging galaxy cluster designated MACSJ2243.3-0935. The formation of radio halos is believed to be linked to the merger of galaxy clusters, which are hugely energetic events - roughly equivalent to a trillion supernovae explosions. One formation scenario suggests that turbulence in the gas of the galaxy cluster accelerates particles to radio-emitting energies leading to the production of radio halos.

 

[Drone]

I guess I'll post it here:

Black Holes and the Structure of Spacetime

Quantum Mechanics and the Geometry of Spacetime

Btw if you don't know Juan Maldacena and Hitoshi Murayama .. they're brilliant theorists

 

[Drone]

I was waiting for this and it happened!

By pushing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This surprisingly bright, infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past [at a redshift of 11.1], just 400 million years after the Big Bang [when the Universe was only 3% of its current age]. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.

The combination of Hubble's and Spitzer's imaging reveals that GN-z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and has just 1% of our galaxy's mass in stars [~ a billion solar masses]. However, the newborn GN-z11 is growing fast, forming stars at a rate ~ 20 times greater than our galaxy does today.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Where to look for it ....

 

[Drone]

 

[Drone]

A group of researchers using the Suprime-Cam instrument on the Subaru Telescope has discovered 80 young galaxies at the distance of 12.6 billion ly.

At least 54 of the galaxies are spatially resolved in the ACS images. Among them, 8 galaxies show double-component structures and the remaining 46 seem to have elongated structures. 2 galaxies seem to be merging with each other.

These results strongly suggest that 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, galactic clumps in the young Universe grow to become large galaxies through mergers, which then causes active star formation to take place.

 

[Ahhzz]

just the thought of how much is out there about which we'll never know....

 

[Drone]

Kip Thorne lectures (streamable and downloadable)

http://elmer.tapir.caltech.edu/ph237/week1/week1.html
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/scripts/lectures.html

A short video with Rashid Sunyaev on the fate of Milky Way, Andromeda and Solar System

 

[Drone]

Using data from almost one billion stars, National Science Foundation funded researchers created a 3D map of interstellar dust across 3/4 of the visible sky.

[Dust only makes up ~ 1% of the interstellar medium].

As Carl Sagan famously said, "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."

See the videos of 3D dust mapping here:

http://argonaut.skymaps.info/