WhyCosmo

  Galaxies Just Got Bigger! 🌌 Recent breakthroughs have unveiled something astonishing—galaxies, including our Milky Way, are far more extensive than previously thought! For the first time, astronomers have captured an image of the gas halo surrounding a galaxy, and it's a game-changer. This discovery shows that galaxies are not just clusters of stars but massive gas reservoirs extending much farther than imagined. The gas shroud around starburst galaxy IRAS 08339+6517. Credit: Cristy Roberts ANU/ASTRO 3D. Using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager in Hawai'i, scientists studied the galaxy IRAS 08339+6517, located 260 million light-years away. The new imaging reveals that its gas halo stretches to 100,000 light-years, dwarfing the stellar disc, which is just 7,800 light-years across. The study also indicates that the Milky Way already interacts with the Andromeda Galaxy, which lies just 2.5 million light-years away. Gas flows into galaxies along spiralling filaments. This image of a ga...

  Astrophysicists have made a groundbreaking discovery by detecting long-period gravitational waves using data from 68 pulsars . This significant finding, reported by NANOGrav , aligns with predictions of general relativity and provides new insights into supermassive black holes and galaxy mergers. Artist’s interpretation of an array of pulsars being affected by gravitational ripples produced by a supermassive black hole binary in a distant galaxy. Credit: Aurore Simonnet for the NANOGrav Collaboration Using large radio telescopes, researchers observed cosmic clocks to find evidence for gravitational waves oscillating over years to decades. This continuous signal followed over 15 years, transforms our sector of the Milky Way into a vast gravitational-wave detector. Pulsars, the ultra-dense remnants of massive stars, serve as precise cosmic timepieces. By monitoring 68 pulsars with facilities like Arecibo Observatory and Green Bank Telescope, NANOGrav has shown the first evidence f...