It has been said that to understand water is to understand the cosmos and life itself. New observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected this primal substance in the most massive galaxy in the early Universe.
Cosmological simulations include dozens of prescriptions to describe the 13.8-billion-year evolution of the Universe, including numerical recipes for dark energy (so-called lambda), weakly interacting cold dark matter, gas accretion onto primordial galaxies, star formation and evolution, and feedback from quasars and supernovae. The outcome of these lambda cold dark matter simulations reproduce many of the observed features of the real universe. However, the models predict that dozens of small dwarf satellite galaxies should orbit medium-sized galaxies like our Milky Way and Andromeda in random orientations, but new research suggests most satellite galaxies orbit their host galaxies aligned along a single plane.
A colossal “cold front” hurtling through the Perseus galaxy cluster spans about two million light years and has been traveling for over five billion years, over a third of the age of the universe, longer than the existence of our Solar System. Astronomers expected that such an old cold front would have been blurred out or eroded over time because it has traveled for billions of years through a harsh environment of sound waves and turbulence caused by outbursts from the huge black hole at the center of Perseus.
One of the major problems in understanding the formation of galaxies is that approximately 80% of the baryons that make up the normal matter of galaxies is missing, expelled over eons from galaxies into inter-galactic space by the galactic winds created by stellar explosions.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
In 2019, astronomers accidentally discovered the faint, shimmering blob of a monster galaxy cloaked in dust and a lot of mystery in the early universe. Like a cosmic Yeti, the scientific community generally regarded these galaxies as folklore, given the lack of evidence of their existence, but astronomers in the United States and Australia managed to snap a picture of the beast for the first time. The discovery provides new insights into the some of the biggest galaxies in the universe.
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