Category: Astronomy

ENG: A new study, featured in Physical Review D as an Editors’ Suggestion, revolves around a comprehensive analysis of over a million galaxies to understand the origins of cosmic structures. Utilizing the ΛCDM model, which incorporates cold dark matter and dark energy, researchers focus on the primordial fluctuations in the early universe. These fluctuations, though initially small, grew due to gravitational forces, leading to the formation of dense dark matter regions and eventually celestial bodies like galaxies. The study emphasizes the influence of these fluctuations on the spatial distribution of galaxies, a key factor in understanding the universe’s formation.

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ENG: In the outer regions of the Milky Way, our blue planet rotates in its orbit around the Sun, the massive center of our Solar System. 26,000 light-years away, a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* is at the center of our galaxy. It is a sleeping giant with a mass 4.3 million times greater than our sun. Black holes are immense forces in the Universe, but the mechanisms by which they grow have been a mystery to researchers. Researchers from DARK at the Niels Bohr Institute, along with a colleague in the US, have now succeeded in demonstrating one effective way that activates black holes and feeds their insatiable appetites: This happens as they devour intergalactic gas transported from one galaxy to another – in connection with a galactic collision or as one galaxy passes close to another.

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ENG: Data collected by remote-sensing satellites is fundamental for many key activities, including aerial mapping, weather prediction, and monitoring deforestation. Currently, most satellites can only passively collect data, since they are not equipped to make decisions or detect changes. Instead, data has to be relayed to Earth to be processed, which typically takes several hours or even days. This limits the ability to identify and respond to rapidly emerging events, such as a natural disaster.

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ENG: In 2015, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountered the Pluto-Charon system, the Southwest Research Institute-led (SwRI) science team discovered interesting, geologically active objects instead of the inert icy orbs previously envisioned. An SwRI scientist has revisited the data to explore the source of cryovolcanic flows and an obvious belt of fractures on Pluto’s large moon Charon. These new models suggest that when the moon’s internal ocean froze, it may have formed the deep, elongated depressions along its girth but was less likely to lead to cryovolcanoes erupting with ice, water and other materials in its northern hemisphere.

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