The first stars in the Universe are believed to have formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago. They heated and ionized the pristine intergalactic medium, and their supernova explosions enriched the primordial gas with the first heavy elements (the Universe was born with only hydrogen [continue reading]
Astronomers using the combined power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a far-flung trio of primitive galaxies nestled inside an enormous blob of primordial gas nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth. This composite image reveals the structure of Himiko, an object representing the merger of [continue reading]
NASA’s Great Observatories are teaming up to look deeper into the Universe than ever before. With a boost from natural “zoom lenses” found in space, they should be able to uncover galaxies that are as much as 100 times fainter than what the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space telescopes can typically see. Abell 2744 [continue reading]
The densest galaxy in the nearby Universe may have been found. Packed with an extraordinary number of stars, this unusual galaxy is providing astronomers with clues to its intriguing past and how it fits into the galactic evolutionary chain. This composite image shows M60 and the region around it, where data from NASAís Chandra [continue reading]
The early galaxies of the Universe were very different from today’s galaxies. Using new detailed studies carried out with the ESO Very Large Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers, including members from the Niels Bohr Institute, have studied an early galaxy in unprecedented detail and determined a number of important properties such as [continue reading]
A research team led by Bunyo Hatsukade, a postdoc researcher, and Kouji Ohta, a professor, both from the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, revealed that approximately 80% of the unidentifiable millimeter wave signals from the Universe is actually emitted from galaxies, based on the observations with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array). ALMA’s high [continue reading]