European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: ESO Science Release eso1620

Schematic diagram of the history of the Universe.
Image credits: NAOJ.

A team of astronomers has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to detect glowing oxygen in a distant galaxy seen just 700 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant galaxy in which oxygen has ever been unambiguously detected, and it is most likely being ionised by powerful radiation from young giant stars. This galaxy could be an example of one type of source responsible for cosmic reionisation in the early history of the Universe. (learn more)

Source: ESA/Hubble Science Release heic1604

Most distant galaxy .
Image credits: NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)

By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This galaxy existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang and provides new insights into the first generation of galaxies. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.(learn more)

Source: Chandra Press

Jet from a very distant black hole, called B3 0727+409, found using the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Image credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ISAS/A.Simionescu et al, Optical: DSS

Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a jet from a very distant supermassive black hole being illuminated by the oldest light in the Universe. This discovery shows that black holes with powerful jets may be more common than previously thought in the first few billion years after the Big Bang.

The light detected from this jet was emitted when the Universe was only 2.7 billion years old, a fifth of its present age. At this point, the intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB, left over from the Big Bang was much greater than it is today.(read more)

Source: ESO Science Release eso1545

Massive galaxies discovered in the early Universe.
Image credits:ESO/UltraVISTA team.
Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU

ESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.(read more)

Source: ESA/Hubble release heic1523

Hubble Frontier Fields view of MACSJ0416.1–2403.
Image credits: NASA, ESA and the HST Frontier Fields team (STScI)

Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have taken advantage of gravitational lensing to reveal the largest sample of the faintest and earliest known galaxies in the Universe. Some of these galaxies formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang and are fainter than any other galaxy yet uncovered by Hubble. The team has determined, for the first time with some confidence, that these small galaxies were vital to creating the Universe that we see today. (read more)

Source: ESO Organisation Release eso1533

                This composite picture shows how a typical galaxy appears at different wavelengths in the GAMA survey.             Image credits: ICRAR/GAMA and ESO

An international team of astronomers studying more than 200 000 galaxies has measured the energy generated within a large portion of space more precisely than ever before. This represents the most comprehensive assessment of the energy output of the nearby Universe. They confirm that the energy produced in a section of the Universe today is only about half what it was two billion years ago and find that this fading is occurring across all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the far infrared. The Universe is slowly dying. (learn more)

Source: ESO Science Release eso1530

ALMA witnesses assembly of galaxy in early Universe.
Image credits: ESO/R. Maiolino.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has been used to detect the most distant clouds of star-forming gas yet found in normal galaxies in the early Universe. The new observations allow astronomers to start to see how the first galaxies were built up and how they cleared the cosmic fog during the era of reionisation. This is the first time that such galaxies are seen as more than just faint blobs.(learn more)

Source:ESA/Hubble Science Release heic1508

Image credit:ESA/Hubble & NASA
Image acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt and J. Blakeslee (Dominion Astrophysical Observatory). Note that the image is not related to science release content.
Science acknowledgement: M. Carollo (ETH, Switzerland)

Astronomers have shown for the first time how star formation in "dead" galaxies sputtered out billions of years ago. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed that three billion years after the Big Bang, these galaxies still made stars on their outskirts, but no longer in their interiors. The quenching of star formation seems to have started in the cores of the galaxies and then spread to the outer parts. The results will be published in the 17 April 2015 issue of the journal Science. (learn more)

Source: ESA/Hubble

The most distant gravitational lens yet discovered
Image credits: NASA/ESA/A. van der Wel

An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet — a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky — or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early Universe. (read more)

Source: ESA/Herschel

Massive galaxy merger caught in the act.
Image credits:ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/STScI/Keck/NRAO/SAO.

A rare encounter between two gas-rich galaxies spotted by ESA’s Herschel space observatory indicates a solution to an outstanding problem: how did massive, passive galaxies form in the early Universe? (read more)

Credit ESO Science Release 1318

Image credits:ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Hodge et al., A. Weiss et al., NASA Spitzer Science Center

A team of astronomers has used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope to pinpoint the locations of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. ALMA is so powerful that, in just a few hours, it captured as many observations of these galaxies as have been made by all similar telescopes worldwide over a span of more than a decade.(read more)

Source: ESA/Hubble heic1217

Hubble spots candidate for most distant known galaxy.
Image credits: NASA, ESA, and M. Postman and D. Coe (Space Telescope Science Institute), and the CLASH team.

By combining the power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and one of nature’s zoom lenses, astronomers have found what is probably the most distant galaxy yet seen in the Universe. The object offers a peek back into a time when the Universe was only 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years.(read more)

Source: NASA Spitzer

Artist's impression of the cosmic distance ladder.
Image credits:NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have announced the most precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart.

The Hubble constant is named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who astonished the world in the 1920s by confirming our universe has been expanding since it exploded into being 13.7 billion years ago. In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered the expansion is accelerating, or speeding up over time. Determining the expansion rate is critical for understanding the age and size of the universe.

Unlike NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which views the cosmos in visible light, Spitzer took advantage of  long-wavelength infrared light to make its new measurement. It improves by a factor of 3 on a similar, seminal study from the Hubble telescope and brings the uncertainty down to 3 percent, a giant leap in accuracy for cosmological measurements. The newly refined value for the Hubble constant is 74.3 ± 2.1 kilometers per second per megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years. (read more)

Source: Daily Galaxy

Physicists said Thursday the potential discovery of the "God particle" was a gateway to a new era that could see humanity unlock some of the universe's great mysteries including dark matter.

The discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to help explain why matter has mass, was hailed as a huge moment for science by physicists gathered in Australia, where CERN's findings were unveiled via videolink from Geneva at a landmark conference attended by hundreds of the field's top experts.

Scientists hailed the announcement, speculating that it could one day make light speed travel possible by "un-massing" objects or allow huge items to be launched into space by "switching off" the Higgs.* CERN scientist Albert de Roeck likened it to the discovery of electricity, when he said humanity could never have imagined its future applications.

"What's really important for the Higgs is that it explains how the world could be the way that it is in the first millionth of a second in the Big Bang," de Roeck told AFP.* "Can we apply it to something? At this moment my imagination is too small to do that."

Physicist Ray Volkas said "almost everybody" was hoping that, rather than fitting the so-called Standard Model of physics -- a theory explaining how particles fit together in the Universe -- the Higgs boson would prove to be "something a bit different".

"If that was the case that would point to all sorts of new physics, physics that might have something to do with dark matter," he said, referring to the hypothetical invisible matter thought to make up much of the universe.

British physicist Peter Higgs smiles at a press conference on July 4, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) offices in Meyrin near Geneva. After a quest spanning nearly half a century, physicists said on July 4 they had found a new sub-atomic particle consistent with the Higgs boson which is believed to confer mass.

"It could be, for example, that the Higgs particle acts as a bridge between ordinary matter, which makes up atoms, and dark matter, which we know is a very important component of the universe."

"That would have really fantastic implications for understanding all of the matter in the universe, not just ordinary atoms," he added.* De Roeck said scrutinising the new particle and determining whether it supported something other than the Standard Model would be the next step for CERN scientists.

Clarification could be expected by the beginning of 2013; definitive proof that it fitted the Standard Model could take until 2015 when the LHC had more power and could harvest more data.

The LHC is due to go offline for a two-year refit in December that will see its firepower doubled to 14 trillion electronvolts -- a huge step forward in the search for new particles and clues about what holds them all together. De Roeck said he would find it a "little boring at the end if it turns out that this is just the Standard Model Higgs".

Instead, he was hoping it would be a "gateway or a portal to new physics, to new theories which are actually running nature" such as supersymmetry, which hypothesises that there are five different Higgs particles governing mass.

The hunt for Higgs -- the logical next step of which de Roeck said would be searching for, and eventually being able to produce, dark matter particles -- has already had huge benefits to medicine and technology.

Volkas said the Internet was born at CERN as a solution to high-volume data-sharing and other major spin-offs were likely to follow as physicists continued to "push the boundaries of pure science".

Source:MinutePhysics

Source: NASA Spitzer

The constellation Boötes, dubbed the "Extended Groth Strip."
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC

The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.

The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel. (read more)

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

A "super-Earth" is an exoplanet (a planet around another star) whose mass is between about two and ten Earth-masses. Planets larger than this are closer to Uranus and Neptune in size (and perhaps in other physical properties as well). The category of "super-Earth" currently refers only to the mass of the object, and not to its radius, its orbital distance from the star, its surface temperature, or its atmospheric properties, although naturally astronomers are working hard to identify super-Earths that might offer clues about the Earth in these features. Of the 576 exoplanets whose basic parameters are currently approximately known, there are 36 in the super-Earth category.

Four CfA astronomers, Zachory Berta, David Charbonneau, Jean-Michel Desert, and Jonathan Irwin, together with six colleagues, used the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the atmosphere around the transiting super-Earth known as GJ1214b. This exoplanet has a mass of 6.5 Earth-masses and a radius of 2.7 Earth-radii, and it orbits a small M-dwarf star (its diameter is only 21% of the Sun's). They used the Hubble infrared spectrometer to observe the planet as it transited across the face of the star; as it did so, the planet's atmosphere absorbed light from the star, thus subtly altering the star's intrinsic spectrum as we observe it. The intrinsic spectrum itself was carefully measured and subtracted after the transit.

Earlier models tried to predict what the atmosphere of this super-Earth might contain, based on ground-based transit spectra of it and on our current knowledge of the atmospheres of the planets in the solar system. For example, an atmosphere dominated by molecular hydrogen is one possibility; this is the situation in Jupiter. But measurements made in three separate transits found no evidence for this scenario - nor were they consistent with an equilibrium atmosphere composed of elements whose relative abundances are those of the average solar system. Instead, the astronomers concluded that, unless the atmosphere has a thick top layer of clouds obscuring our view, its probable composition includes abundant water vapor. Probing the atmosphere around a planet orbiting a star 42 light-years away is a remarkable achievement and an early step. Future observations of this and other transiting exoplanets will tell us more about the atmospheres of exoplanets, and lead to a better understanding of how atmospheres form, evolve, and behave under a wide range of physical conditions.

Source: ESO Science Release eso1206

Distant star-forming galaxies in the early Universe
Image credits: ESO, APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO),
A. Weiss et al., NASA Spitzer Science Center

Using the APEX telescope, a team of astronomers has found the strongest link so far between the most powerful bursts of star formation in the early Universe, and the most massive galaxies found today. The galaxies, flowering with dramatic starbursts in the early Universe, saw the birth of new stars abruptly cut short, leaving them as massive — but passive — galaxies of aging stars in the present day. The astronomers also have a likely culprit for the sudden end to the starbursts: the emergence of supermassive black holes. (read more)

Source: ESA

Artist's impression of the four Cluster spacecraft flying through the thin layer of Earth's bow shock.
Image credits: SA/AOES Medialab.

ESA's Cluster satellites have discovered that cosmic particle accelerators are more efficient than previously thought. The discovery has revealed the initial stages of acceleration for the first time, a process that could apply across the Universe.

On 9 January 2005, Cluster's four satellites passed through a magnetic shock high above Earth. The spinning craft were aligned almost perfectly with the magnetic field, allowing them to sample what was happening to electrons on very short timescales of 250 milliseconds or less.

The measurements showed that the electrons rose sharply in temperature, which established conditions favourable to larger scale acceleration. (read more)

Source: ESO Science Release eso1138

A galaxy seen when the Universe was only 820 million years old.
Image credits:ESO/ L. Pentericci.

Scientists have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to probe the early Universe at several different times as it was becoming transparent to ultraviolet light. This brief but dramatic phase in cosmic history — known as reionisation — occurred around 13 billion years ago. By carefully studying some of the most distant galaxies ever detected, the team has been able to establish a timeline for reionisation for the first time. They have also demonstrated that this phase must have happened quicker than astronomers previously thought. (read more)