Astronomers have uncovered a previously unknown, extreme kind of star factory by taking the temperature of a distant galaxy using the ALMA telescope. The galaxy is glowing intensely in superheated cosmic dust while forming stars 180 times faster than our own Milky Way. The discovery indicates how galaxies could have grown quickly when the universe was very young, solving a long-standing puzzle for astronomers. 

The first generations of stars formed under conditions very different from anywhere we can see in the nearby universe today. Astronomers are studying these differences using powerful telescopes that can detect galaxies so far away their light has taken billions of years to reach us.  

Now, an international team of astronomers led by Tom Bakx at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has measured the temperature of one of the most distant known star factories. The galaxy, known as Y1, is so far away that its light has taken over 13 billion years to reach us.  

A comprehensive set of simulations by Flatiron Institute astrophysicists and their colleagues revealed that magnetic fields are responsible for creating black holes with masses in a range previously thought to be largely off-limits.

Last week, four lasers were projected into the skies above the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal site in Chile. The lasers are each used to create an artificial star, which astronomers use to measure and then correct the blur caused by Earth's atmosphere. The striking launch of these lasers, one from each of the eight-metre telescopes at Paranal, is a significant milestone of the GRAVITY+ project — a large and complex upgrade to ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). GRAVITY+ unlocks a greater observing power and a much wider sky coverage for the VLTI than previously possible.

The recent test, announced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today, mark a significant milestone of the GRAVITY+ project, a complex upgrade to ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), unlocking greater observing power and much wider sky coverage.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) provides valuable information about a material’s properties and electronic states. However, it requires extensive expertise and manual effort for conventional analysis. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a novel artificial intelligence-based approach for analyzing XAS data that can enable rapid, autonomous, and object material identification. This novel approach outperforms the previous studies in terms of higher accuracy, accelerating the development of new materials.