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Composite image showing the fountain-like gas flow fed by the supermassive black hole of the central galaxy.
CREDIT: ALMA, Tremblay et al .; NRAO / AUI / NSF, B. Saxton; NASA / Chandra; ESO / V
(CNN) – This week, scientists speculated that an interstellar object called "Oumuamua" could be an extraterrestrial probe because of the way it was accelerating in our solar system when it was bombarding last year.
The Parker solar probe is doing well despite its first close contact with the sun, 15 million kilometers from its surface, after approaching closer to our star than any spacecraft. The Mars Curiosity rover has just made a long drive along the Martian surface, the longest after a computer malfunction in September. And Opportunity, the other rover on Mars, is still sadly silent.
Here is what you missed in the space this week.
Galactic Fountain
It's a fountain in which you will not want to play, but it's beautiful to see.
At more than a billion light-years from Earth, a black hole located at the center of the gigantic elliptical Abell 2597 attracts cold molecular gas and reflects it in the manner of a jet or d & # 39; A fountain. The observations of the network of large telescopes and the very large telescope of the European Atacama European Observatory were published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.
This process is doomed to be repeated over and over again. The cold gas falls into the black hole, igniting the black hole, and throws plasma jets glowing in space. But the plasma can not escape the gravity of the galaxy, so it falls back into the black hole.
"The evolution of galaxies can be quite chaotic, and large galaxies like this one tend to live hard and die young," said Timothy Davis of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. "For the first time, we were able to observe the complete cycle of a supermassive black hole fountain, which regulates this process, extending the life of galaxies."
Black holes merge
We know that galaxies fuse to form larger galaxies, but for the first time, astronomers have observed several pairs of galaxies as they come together. And they could see supermassive black holes in the center of these galaxies coming together to form a giant black hole.
The research was published in the journal Nature this week.
"Seeing the pairs of molten galaxy nuclei associated with these huge black holes so close to each other was rather amazing," said Michael Koss, researcher at Eureka Scientific. "In our study, we see two galaxy nuclei just at the moment the images were taken. You can not argue with her; it is a very "net" result, which does not rest on an interpretation. "
The Hubble Space Telescope archive images, as well as the high-resolution images taken by the adaptive optics system of the W.M. Keck Observatory, provided a breathtaking first glimpse.
This is probably what will happen in 4 billion years when our galaxy The Milky Way will merge with its neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.
Death of a galaxy
A nearby small dwarf galaxy, the Little Magellanic Cloud, is only a fraction of the size of the Milky Way – and loses the power it uses to form stars.
The detailed details provided by the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope network radio images, published in a Nature Astronomy study this week, show the disappearance of the galaxy as it loses gas.
"The galaxies that stop forming stars are gradually disappearing into oblivion. It's kind of a slow death for a galaxy that loses all its gas, "said Naomi McClure-Griffiths of the School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University.
Finally, astronomers think that it will be eaten by the Milky Way.
Flock of stars
These stars are a bit of a wild duck. Meet the group of wild ducks, which includes 2,900 stars.
Astronomers thought that open star clusters would only contain stars of the same generation. But the group of wild ducks has bright stars of different colors, suggesting that they are of different ages. Blue stars are usually younger and red stars are older
But in a new study, researchers have realized that the open cluster plays them a trick. Their rotation makes them appear in different ages and colors.
Their rotation causes their wavelength to appear reduced by contact with one of the star's sides facing the Earth, which deforms the light it emits and makes them appear blue or red.
A star from a long time ago
Astronomers have discovered what could be one of the oldest stars in the universe, that is, materials originally derived from the Big Bang. This 13.5 billion-year-old star is tiny, with low mass and low metal content, which could indicate the very first stars born.
The first stars were full of elements such as helium, hydrogen and lithium, producing heavier elements and propagating them in the universe when they exploded. This would allow the subsequent stars to have more metals and other elements.
This star was found as an almost invisible secondary star in a binary star system. And if this old star can be observed, there may be even older ones to study.
"This star is perhaps one in 10 million," said Kevin Schlaufman, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. "It tells us something very important about the first generations of stars."
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