The two giant radio galaxies found with the MeerKAT telescope. In the background is the sky as seen in optical light. Overlaid in red is the radio light from the enormous radio galaxies, as seen by MeerKAT. Photo: Dr Ian Heywood (Oxford/Rhodes/SARAO)
Researchers make astonishing galactic find with SAâs MeerKAT telescope
By Robin-Lee Francke
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Cape Town - Researchers are floating on cloud nine after two giant radio galaxies were discovered using South Africaâs powerful MeerKAT telescope.
The MeerKAT telescope is located in the Karoo region of South Africa and comprises 64 radio dishes. It was inaugurated in July 2018.
Based on what we currently know about the density of giant radio galaxies in the sky, the probability of finding two of them in this region is extremely small.
Pourquoi certaines galaxies massives de l Univers jeune se sont-elles éteintes ? numerama.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from numerama.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Stars form in clusters from large clouds of gas and dust. The Milky Way forms star clusters with masses 10,000 times that of our Sun. A new study shows that other galaxies can easily form much bigger clusters, which can be millions of times the mass of our Sun. There’s a catch though: These galaxies must be merging.
As reported in a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, observations of six merging pairs of galaxies suggest that star clusters up to 1 million solar masses can form in these collisions. An increase in star formation for colliding galaxies was well established, but the estimate of how it is concentrated in large clusters is an important insight into galaxy evolution.
Art by Charlotte Leakey.
If you’ve ever read a schlocky sci-fi novel or tuned into an episode of
Cosmos, you’ve probably heard of dark matter, the mysterious sister to ordinary baryonic matter that makes up some eighty-five percent of our universe. So-called because it doesn’t interact with EM radiation or normal matter, dark matter has only ever been observed indirectly via its gravitational influence. What is it made of? No one is quite sure candidate explanations range from new elementary particles to primordial black holes. Nearly all of the major schools of thought in the astrophysics community subscribe to a “cold dark matter” model, in which the constituent particles move slowly and larger structures emerge hierarchically from the bottom up. But, while the consensus CDM model has been very successful, there are still some inconsistencies with observation and another big one has just emerged.