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VIDEO: This is CosmoView Episode 18 for press release noirlab2103: Giant Map of the Sky Sets Stage for Ambitious DESI Survey view more
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KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Legacy Imaging Survey, P. Marenfeld, D. Munizaga, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Music: Stellardrone - Airglow.
Astronomers using images from Kitt Peak National Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory have created the largest ever map of the sky, comprising over a billion galaxies. The ninth and final data release from the ambitious DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys sets the stage for a ground-breaking 5-year survey with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which aims to provide new insights into the nature of dark energy. The map was released today at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Open cluster NGC 2158 investigated in detail phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
CQ 4479 was found by NASA’s SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) infrared telescope. This galaxy is an anomaly because quasars indulging in a feeding frenzy usually heat up the rest of the galaxy to the point that atoms and molecules are flying around everywhere and nothing can settle long enough to condense into an astral embryo. This is why its black hole is called a “cold quasar.”
“Cold quasars are weird because they still host star-formation at the same time, and to confirm that stars were still forming, we needed far-infrared data from SOFIA,” Kevin Cooke, who led a study recently published in
The universe we can see is made up of billions of galaxies, each containing anywhere from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of billions of stars.
Large numbers of galaxies are elliptical in shape, red and mostly made up of old stars. Another (more familiar) type is the spiral, where arms wind out in a blue thin disk from a central red bulge.
On average stars in spiral galaxies tend to be much younger than those in ellipticals.
Now a group of astronomers led by Asa Bluck of the University of Victoria in Canada have found a (relatively) simple relationship between the color of a galaxy and the size of its bulge – the more massive the bulge the redder the galaxy.
Discoveries That Really, Really Seemed Like Aliens
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As the famous
X-Filesposter declares, “I want to believe.” This wanting, however, often leads us astray. When confronted with shocking and inexplicable celestial phenomena, we tend to see intelligent design. This jumping to conclusions is a sin for which we can be forgiven we have an insatiable need to know if someone’s out there. When we say, “I want to believe,” what we’re actually saying is, “I hope we’re not alone.”