Growing Galaxies Inside-Out
A picture of galaxy construction emerges by comparing the relative sizes of star-formation and stellar continuum emission from 57 z=1 galaxies.
Shadows Across The Universe: Mg II at High Redshifts
When the light from a distant quasar finally arrives at Earth, it often carries far more information than it did when it was emitted – the shadows of gas and galaxies that have intervened over the cosmic distances between us and the source. These features can tell us how the universe evolves in both space and time, by allowing us to sample both low and high redshifts for structures that would not otherwise be visible. This paper uses a new IR spectrograph, FIRE, deployed on the Magellan 6.5 m telescopes, to present the first high-redshift sample of Mg II absorption systems, including the most distant Mg II system yet found (z = 5.33). The authors show that the number of strong Mg II systems appears to peak and decline in number along with the star formation history of the universe, suggesting a correlation between the two, while weak Mg II systems stay mysteriously constant.
NGC 4261’s off-kilter globular cluster population
We think many galaxies we see today had mergers and interactions in their past, but how can we know for sure? Bonfini et al. look to evidence from a subtle pattern in the distribution of globular clusters in NGC 4261.
Two monster black holes in nearby galaxies
Title: Two ten-billion-solar-mass black holes at the centres of giant elliptical galaxies Authors: Nicholas J. McConnell, Chung-Pei Ma, Karl Gebhardt, Shelley A. Wright, Jeremy D. Murphy, Tod R. Lauer, James R. Graham, Douglas O. Richstone First Author’s Institution: Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley This Nature letter reports on a recent discovery that has also met with great interest in the popular press: astronomers have measured the biggest black holes ever! These two ten-billion-solar mass giants are significantly more massive than any other known black hole and more massive than predicted with the widely-used correlations relating the black hole mass to other properties of the host galaxy.First, a bit of context. Black holes are extremely compact concentrations of matter producing such strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape. General relativity predicts such gravitational singularities of zero volume and thus infinite density. Studying stellar evolution, we learn that the explosions of heavy stars as supernovae can leave behind remnants of stellar mass-black holes. But super-sized black holes of million solar masses (called supermassive black holes) presumably originate from mergers of other black holes, or by accreting large amounts of stars and gas in an active galactic nuclei (AGN) phase.Nowadays astronomers believe that every galaxy harbours a supermassive black hole at its center, including our own Milky Way where a central mass concentration of four million solar masses has been deduced from 16-years monitoring of stellar proper motions (see also today’s astrobite on the amazing discovery of a huge gas cloud being swallowed by this black hole). As pointed out by Susanna’s astrobite, it is not possible...Of cosmic telescopes and high-z galaxies
Lensing occurs when the mass of a foreground object distorts and magnifies the light from a background galaxy or quasar, sometimes even creating multiple images. It probably isn’t a stretch to say that the neatest thing about lensing is that you can typically see two to four images of the same galaxy. But something else that’s cool is that these distant background objects are magnified, making it possible to study them in detail when otherwise they might not be seen at all: in this way, gravitational lenses act as natural cosmic telescopes.
Studying a nearby galaxy merger with multiwavelength observations
Modica et al. and the GOALS team use multiwavelength observations to investigate star formation and nuclear activity in a nearby luminous infrared galaxy.