In 2007, a student discovered a really weird thing in archival radio data. David Narkevic was working for Duncan Lorimer and found a 5-millisecond burst of energy in the Radio that appeared to be of extragalactic origin. In the years since then, over 100 of these objects have been discovered, with a few of them repeating on a regular basis. No one had predicted something like this should exist, and figuring out what exactly we’re seeing has been a wild ride. And the ride has not yet reached the end. Based on what we’ve seen so far, the radio bursts are caused by high energy,...
Black Holes Formed Before Stars
An illustration of a magnetic field generated by a supermassive black hole in the early universe, showing turbulent plasma outflows that help turn nearby gas clouds into stars. New findings suggest this process might be responsible for accelerated star formation in...
Unexpected Galaxy Photobombs Cluster
A color-composite image of PEARLSDG made with JWST NIRCAM data. Individual stars are visible as small points of light in the image. Its somewhat dull color and lack of many bright stars is consistent with its old age and lack of ongoing star formation. Credit: Image...
Quasars Spotted Blowing Away Gas
Artist’s impression of an outflow of molecular gas from the quasar J2054-0005. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) Gas dynamics are more than a little complicated no matter where you look. The dynamics of gas in and around forming galaxies makes is particularly...
Explaining Early Bright Galaxies
A composite of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files from the James Webb Space Telescope. UCLA astrophysicists believe if cold dark matter theories are correct, the Webb telescope should find tiny,...
Distant Black Hole Caught Eating
LST-1 during observations at CTAO-North, La Palma, Spain. Credit: CTAO gGmbH. Credit: CTAO gGmbH Astronomy is theoretically the study of how our universe formed, evolved, and will one day die. But to get answers to those high-concept questions, we need to start by...
Gas Ripples Shake Up Ancient Galaxies
FIR image of BRI 1335–0417 overlaid with our identified bar ellipses (blue ellipse) and two-armed spiral structure identified in Tsukui & Iguchi (2021, black solid line). Contours start at 2σ but are logarithmically spaced in powers of 2 (2σ, 4σ, 8σ,...)....
One Theory Puts Us Somewhere Special
The image shows the distribution of matter in space (blue; the yellow dots represent individual galaxies). The Milky Way (green) lies in an area with little matter. The galaxies in the bubble move in the direction of the higher matter densities (red arrows). The...
Dark Matter Says No to Light; May Interact with Self
Ralf Kaehler/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory One of the great unknowns of nearly the past one hundred years is the identity of the invisible stuff that makes up the bulk of the matter in our galaxy and others. Called dark matter, this stuff can exert...
Galaxy mergers beautifully build bigger galaxies
Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgment: PI: C. Onken (Australian National University); Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (International Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M....
More Theory-Changing Old Galaxies
Credit: Cluster image: NASA, UNCOVER (Bezanson et al., DIO: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.04026). Insets: Nasa, UNCOVER (Wang et al., 2023); Composition: Dani Zemba/Penn State Ok, I have to admit, the JWST is finding objects so exceedingly weird that my first reaction is to...