Orbital science, astronomy, remote sensing, and what lies beyond the atmosphere.
A study in Monthly Notices used deep Webb observations to reveal faint structural scars in galaxies that had recently stopped forming stars. The work points to violent galactic encounters as a likely trigger for the sudden shutdown of star birth in some of the early Universe’s most massive systems.By examining about 120 recently quenched galaxies…
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A study in Nature reports a rare stellar explosion, SN 2021yfj, that gave astronomers an unusually direct view into the inner layers of a massive dying star. The event appears to have come from a star stripped down to an oxygen, silicon and sulfur-rich region, exposing material that usually stays buried until the final collapse.…
A study in Nature reports that JWST observations of the tiny galaxy LAP1-B have revealed the most chemically primitive star-forming galaxy discovered so far. Seen as it existed about 800 million years after the Big Bang, the galaxy carries an unusually faint chemical imprint from the early universe. The international team, led by Kimihiko Nakajima…
A study posted on arXiv suggests that about 300 years ago, a compact swarm of massive stars may have carved a nearly round hole in the glowing gas near the Milky Way’s central black hole. The target is the mini-cavity, a low-density pocket inside the ionized gas known as the mini-spiral around Sagittarius A*. The…
