galaxies – Quanta Magazine

Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy

Jay Bennett — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:05:21 +0000

Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden hand at play: magnetism. “There’s this fantastic quote: You can measure a man’s ignorance by the strength of his magnetic field,” said Susan Clark, an astrophysicist at Stanford University. “In other words, when we have a piece of a problem historically in...

Source

Radio Maps May Reveal the Universe’s Biggest Magnetic Fields

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 14:51:33 +0000

By making maps of the magnetic fields hidden inside massive galaxy clusters, astronomers are getting closer to finding the origin of cosmic magnetism. “These are the first maps of the detailed structure of magnetic fields on an unprecedentedly large scale,” said Alexandre Lazarian, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-author on the paper describing the maps...

Source

In the Milky Way’s Stars, a History of Violence

Rebecca Boyle — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 14:10:05 +0000

Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it was visible as a faint smudge. But through a telescope it sharpened into a brilliant ellipse called the Andromeda Nebula. To settle a debate...

Source

JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe

Charlie Wood — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 14:29:48 +0000

Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if — preferably, when — JWST started making observations, she and her colleagues would have a lot to talk about. Like a time machine, the telescope could see farther away and farther into the past...

Source

A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos

Thomas Lewton — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:00:20 +0000

Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles — those moving much faster than the rest — traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists have sought the origin of these “cosmic” neutrinos. Now, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has finally collected enough of them to...

Source