Astronomers have always suspected that galaxies grow by pulling in material from their surroundings, but this process has proved very difficult to observe directly. Now ESO's Very Large Telescope has been used to study a very rare alignment between a distant galaxy [1] and an even more distant quasar -- the extremely bright centre of a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole. The light from the quasar passes through the material around the foreground galaxy before reaching Earth, making it possible to explore in detail the properties of the gas around the galaxy [2].
Heavens
Mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from billions of light years away have left the scientists who detected them speculating about their origins.
The international research team, writing in the journal Science, rule out terrestrial sources for the four fast radio bursts and say their brightness and distance suggest they come from cosmological distances when the Universe was just half its current age.
The burst energetics indicate that they originate from an extreme astrophysical event involving relativistic objects such as neutron stars or black holes.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — An international group of astronomers that includes UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist Crystal Martin and former UCSB postdoctoral researcher Nicolas Bouché has spotted a distant galaxy hungrily snacking on nearby gas. The gas is seen to fall inward toward the galaxy, creating a flow that both fuels star formation and drives the galaxy's rotation. This is the best direct observational evidence so far supporting the theory that galaxies pull in and devour nearby material in order to grow and form stars.
SYDNEY: An international team led by the University of New South Wales has studied a distant star where gravity is more than 30,000 times greater than on Earth to test its controversial theory that one of the constants of Nature is not a constant.
Dr Julian Berengut and his colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the strength of the electromagnetic force – known as alpha – on a white dwarf star.
New findings from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital reveal an unconventional control mechanism involved in the production of specialized T cells that play a critical role in maintaining immune system balance. The research appears in the current online edition of the scientific journal Nature.
Call it a bird's eye view of migration. Scientists are taking a fresh look at animal movement with a big data approach that combines GPS tracking data with satellite weather and terrain information.
The new Environmental-Data Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) system, featured in the journal Movement Ecology, can handle millions of data points and serve a hundred scientists simultaneously, said co-founder Dr. Roland Kays, a zoologist with North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
The tropical storm that has been hugging the southwestern coast of Mexico moved toward open ocean and strengthened into a hurricane on July 2. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Dalila after moving away from the coast and strengthening into a hurricane. Dalila has become the third hurricane of the Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season after Barbara and Cosme. As Dalila starts to weaken, a new tropical low appears to be developing to the southeast.
At present the forest fires plaguing the area near James Bay in Quebec are causing air quality problems in the area and as far away as Maine. According to CBC News on July 02, 2013, "A smog warning is in effect for most of southwestern Quebec — from Gatineau to Montreal to Drummondville — and a smog advisory has already been effect for eastern Ontario, which was expanded all the way through Toronto and Hamilton.
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 size, mass, content of elements and have determined how quickly the galaxy forms new stars. The results are published in the scientific journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Astronomers recently got their hands on Gemini Observatory's revolutionary new adaptive optics system, called GeMS, "and the data are truly spectacular!" says Robert Blum, Deputy Director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory with funding by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
On July 1, 2013, at 6:09 p.m. EDT, the sun erupted with a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of solar particles into space that can affect electronic systems in satellites. Experimental NASA research models based on NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory show that the CME was not Earth-directed and it left the sun at around 570 miles per second.
This July Fourth the solar system is showing off some fireworks of its own. Superficially resembling a skyrocket, comet ISON is hurtling toward the sun presently at a whopping 48,000 mph.
Its swift motion is captured in this time-lapse movie made from a sequence of pictures taken May 8, 2013, by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. At the time the images were taken, the comet was 403 million miles from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The hiss of air escaping from a leaky car tire is no one's favorite sound.
Even less pleasant? Hearing that hiss of escaping air 250 miles above Earth's surface while inside the pressurized confines of the International Space Station.
Typhoon Rumbia had weakened to a tropical storm and moved over southern China when NASA's TRMM satellite flew above on July 2, 2013 at 0316 UTC and measured its rainfall rates.
An analysis of rainfall from TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation (PR) data shows that Rumbia was dropping rain at a rate of over 92mm/hour (~3.6 inches) in areas of southern China near the Gulf of Tonkin. An intense but narrow feeder band near Hong Kong is shown streaming heavy rainfall into China from the South China Sea.
NOAA's GOES-15 satellite captured an infrared image of the Eastern Pacific Ocean during the pre-dawn hours on July 2 and noticed Tropical Storm Dalila weakening near the southwestern Mexico coast, while further southwest a new tropical low pressure area called System 97E, had formed.