Results tagged “galaxies” from 60 Second Science

Astrophysicist John Dubinski has been running simulations on his supercomputer of galaxies forming, colliding into each other, and otherwise moving around as they are wont to do. Last year he compiled nine animations onto a DVD, wrapped them up with "the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension," and sold Gravitas.

As of this week, he's begun giving the DVD away for free via torrent, but he's posted the series of animations on YouTube, making my day far, far happier than otherwise possible.

Continue reading 'Free galactic simulations are the best part of my day' >

This isn’t going to shake up the big questions in cosmology, but it might change the way you think about the night sky. Those stars you see? They may not be where you think they are.

Gravitational lenses operate like funhouse mirrors in deep space. They can magnify, distort and bend the light from distant galaxies, and make them appear in different places than where you would expect. (No word yet on whether they can make galaxies look taller or thinner or shorter or heavier or wavier…) Gravitational lenses, as their name suggests, are usually giant galaxies so massive that they bend spacetime—and thus redirect light or anything else that happens to be traveling close by.

They can be helpful to astronomers: the magnification and redirection of light allows stargazers to see farther into deep space. And thus, farther back in time.

The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS), led by Nick Scoville at Caltech, recently completed a long, hard look at a patch of the sky roughly equal to the area of 9 full moons (1.6 square degrees). The survey used data from the major league of telescopes: the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and the VLT all contributed images. The researchers found 67 new gravitational lenses.

Continue reading '67 new gravitational lenses; no word yet on scratch-resistant coating' >

As a galaxy, it can get difficult out there in the black. Just cold chillin' on your own gets, well, cold. Elliptical galaxy NGC 1132 (pictured) survives by 1) being huge and 2) containing enormous amounts of dark matter comparable to what you might find in entire groups of galaxies.

This new Hubble image captures the scale of the ginormous galaxy, which either formed as a solo "lone-wolf" amidst tons of galaxy clusters or perhaps merged with other galaxies in recent history. The amount of dark matter classifies the galaxy as a "fossil-group" system, a rare galaxy that formed when growth of moderate-sized galaxies got suppressed, leaving only one massive galaxy to form.

The elliptical NGC 1132 emanates tons of yellow light — which pours out from the aging stars within. Since it's 318 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus, it's not like we'll have any contact. But hey, 1132 — if you get too lonely, don't be afraid to text us or something.

(click image for hi-res)

Isolated Galaxy or Corporate Merger? Hubble Spies NGC 1132 (HubbleSite)

In the last few years, astronomers have identified 10 “hypervelocity” stars, which race away from the Milky Way at 10 times the speed of normal stars. Nine of these burning bullets are believed to have originated in our own galaxy. What about #10?

Yesterday, astronomers from the Carnegie Institution and Queen’s University Belfast announced that the stellar stranger isn’t from around here. The star is believed to be only about 35 million years old, but it’s about 100 million years away from the center of our galaxy. (They’re calling this the “paradox of youth.”) They estimate that the star is moving at about 1.6 million miles per hour.

How to explain the conflict between its time and position? The stargazers came up with two theories and finally settled on this one: they believe the young star “recently” escaped from the Large Magellanic Cloud (one of our nearest neighboring galaxies).
“Escaped” is probably the wrong word here—“violently expelled” is more like it.

Continue reading 'Interstellar fugitive?' >

Astronomers have taken a snapshot of a cosmic rarity, the merging of three galaxies. And oh what a picture! By combining a 30 minute infrared exposure from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the stargazers managed to produce this pretty three-color portrait of a galactic hybrid, known as either ESO 593-IG 008 or IRAS 19115-2124, 650 million light years away.

The researchers already knew that the stellar smash-up involved two galaxies, but three? (See next page for an image where you can clearly count all three galactic nuclei.)

The…image has allowed astronomers to not only see the two previously known galaxies, but to identify a third, clearly separate component, an irregular, yet fairly massive galaxy that seems to form stars at a frantic rate.

The span of this beast is about 100,000 light years.

Continue reading 'Deep space ménage à trois' >