Latest Large-scale structure of the cosmos Stories
Watch the video “Intergalactic Clouds Lurk Between Nearby Galaxies" John P. Millis, PhD for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As we gaze into space beyond the confines of our own Milky Way, we see a Universe filled with galaxies. But what scientists have come to realize is that the emptiness that spans between these giant pools of stars is not empty at all, but rather is filled with massive amounts of gas. In fact, these gas reservoirs can sometimes outweigh the galaxies...
[WATCH VIDEO: Space Warps Gravitational Lensing Animation] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Volunteers are being summoned to help astronomers find "space warps," leading to the discovery of faraway objects. Space warps, more commonly known as "gravitational lenses," allow objects in space to act as a giant lens to other objects even farther away. Studies have found that the human brain is much better at identifying lenses than current computer algorithms, so...
Subaru Telescope A duo of astronomers, Dr. Youichi Ohyama (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan) and Dr. Ananda Hota (UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in the Basic Sciences or CBS, India), has discovered a Blue Supergiant star located far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy in the constellation Virgo. Over fifty-five million years ago, it emerged in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million degrees centigrade) and amidst raging...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists are coming together this summer to try and collaborate on solving the mystery of dark matter. Probes of Dark Matter on Galaxy Scales 2013, will be held July 14–19 in Monterey, California. Scientists at the conference will be meeting to discuss their techniques for solving the secrets of dark matter in the universe. “The idea is to bring together people working on different probes of dark matter from dynamics, which...
Subaru Telescope In a course of studying young galaxies at a distance of 11.6 billion light years from Earth, a team of astronomers led by Professor Yoshiaki Taniguchi (Ehime University) noticed a strangely shaped galaxy that looks like a "magatama", an ancient, comma-shaped Japanese amulet made of stone. Subsequent research revealed that the magatama galaxy was actually an overlapping system of two young galaxies lying in an extremely close line of sight--an exceedingly rare occurrence...
John P. Millis, PhD for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Listen to redOrbit's exclusive interview “What Is Dark Matter Podcast” with Dr. Matthew Walker (Or right-click on the above link to download the file to your computer) In the early 1930s, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwickey made a startling observation that would eventually become one of the greatest cosmological riddles of the twentieth century and beyond. While attempting to measure the mass of a large group of...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Studying the physics of the universe can be a controversial and often contradictory proposition, with theories and calculations often not matching with observations. However, new research from Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, has shed some light on one situation involving differences between theory and observation. Scientists at the institute have found that a phenomenon known as “cosmic web stripping” is...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As grand and colorful as it is, our solar system is a fleck in the grander cosmos. Our Milky Way galaxy has hundreds of billions of solar systems, yet it is only just a drop in the sea of galaxies. Galaxy clusters, the rarest and largest of galaxy groupings, can be the hardest to find, which is where NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) becomes helpful. So far, the mission's all-sky infrared maps have revealed one...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new observation of Abell 520 using the Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers determine that the core of the galaxy cluster is not over-dense in dark matter after all. Astronomers earlier this year spotted an overabundance of dark matter in the heart of the galaxy cluster. This observation was puzzling because dark matter and galaxies should be anchored together. Scientists have evidence that dark matter is responsible...
ESA ESA’s Planck space telescope has made the first conclusive detection of a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters across 10 million light-years of intergalactic space. Planck’s primary task is to capture the most ancient light of the cosmos, the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. As this faint light traverses the Universe, it encounters different types of structure including galaxies and galaxy clusters – assemblies of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound...
Latest Large-scale structure of the cosmos Reference Libraries
The Virgo Cluster consists of galaxies at a distance of around 59 Mly away in the constellation Virgo. Containing between 1300 to 2000 galaxies the Virgo Cluster is the heart of the Local Supercluster. Its mass is estimated at 1.2 × 1015 M☉ out to 8 degrees of the cluster's center or a radius of about 2.2 Mpc. Most of the brighter galaxies in the cluster were discovered by Charles Messier in the late 1770's and early 1780's, including the giant elliptical Messier 87. Messier...
The two Magellanic Clouds (or Nubeculae Magellani), composed of the Large Megellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, are irregular dwarf galaxies visible in the southern hemisphere. They are members of our Local Group and orbit the Milky Way galaxy. Persian astronomer Al Sufi, in 964, was the first to have written anything about the Magellanic Clouds proving they have been known since early time amongst the Middle East peoples. Sufi, in his Book of Fixed Stars, calls the clouds...
The NGC 5866, located in the Draco constellation, is named after the galaxy with the highest magnitude however some catalogs list NGC 5907 as the brightest member. The M51 Group and the M101 Group are NGC 5866 closest neighbor. The distances between these groups are similar which suggest the three groups are part of a single large, loose, elongated group. However, most identification methods consider them separate.
The M101 Group, one of many in the Virgo Supercluster, is located in Ursa Major and named after the brightest galaxy in the group, the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). The group is composed mostly of members that are companions of the Pinwheel Galaxy. The M51 Group and the NGC 5866 Group are M101's closest neighbor. The distances between these groups are similar which suggest the three groups are part of a single large, loose, elongated group. However, most identification methods consider them...
The M81 Group, containing the well known galaxies Messier 81 and Messier 82, is a group of galaxies within the constellation Ursa Major. Along with Messier 81 and 82 are several other galaxies with apparent brightness. The center, located at an approximate distance of 3.6 Mpc, is one of the nearest groups to the Local Group. The total estimated mass of the group is (1.03 ± 0.17) × 1012M☉. The Virgo Supercluster contains the M81 Group, the Local Group, and some other nearby...
