Search Publications
Analogues of primeval galaxies two billion years after the Big Bang
Castellano, Marco; Fontana, Adriano; Giavalisco, Mauro +30 more
Deep observations are revealing a growing number of young galaxies in the first billion years of cosmic time1. Compared to typical galaxies at later times, they show more extreme emission-line properties2, higher star formation rates3, lower masses4, and smaller sizes5. However, their faintnes…
A tidal disruption event in the nearby ultra-luminous infrared galaxy F01004-2237
Mullaney, J.; Rose, M.; Tadhunter, C. +2 more
Tidal disruption events (TDEs), in which stars are gravitationally disrupted as they pass close to the supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies 1 , are potentially important probes of strong gravity and accretion physics. Most TDEs have been discovered in large-area monitoring surveys of many thousands of galaxies, and a rela…
Stars caught in the braking stage in young Magellanic Cloud clusters
D'Antona, Francesca; Milone, Antonino P.; Tailo, Marco +3 more
The colour-magnitude diagrams of many Magellanic Cloud clusters (with ages up to 2 billion years) display extended turnoff regions where the stars leave the main sequence, suggesting the presence of multiple stellar populations with ages that may differ even by hundreds of millions of years 1,2,3 . A strongly debated question is whether…
The large-scale nebular pattern of a superwind binary in an eccentric orbit
Morris, Mark R.; Liu, Sheng-Yuan; Taam, Ronald E. +5 more
Preplanetary nebulae and planetary nebulae are evolved, mass-losing stellar objects that show a wide variety of morphologies. Many of these nebulae consist of outer structures that are nearly spherical (spiral/shell/arc/halo) and inner structures that are highly asymmetric (bipolar/multipolar) 1,2 . The coexistence of such geometrically…
Ten billion years of brightest cluster galaxy alignments
West, Michael J.; Phillipps, Steven; Bremer, Malcolm N. +1 more
A galaxy's orientation is one of its most basic observable properties. Astronomers once assumed that galaxies are randomly oriented in space; however, it is now clear that some have preferred orientations with respect to their surroundings. Chief among these are giant elliptical galaxies found in the centres of rich galaxy clusters. Numerous studi…
Spectroscopic confirmation of an ultra-faint galaxy at the epoch of reionization
Pentericci, Laura; Schmidt, Kasper B.; Treu, Tommaso +11 more
Within one billion years of the Big Bang, intergalactic hydrogen was ionized by sources emitting ultraviolet and higher energy photons. This was the final phenomenon to globally affect all the baryons (visible matter) in the Universe. It is referred to as cosmic reionization and is an integral component of cosmology. It is broadly expected that in…
The Galaxy's veil of excited hydrogen
Zaritsky, Dennis; Zhang, Huanian
Many of the baryons in our Galaxy probably lie outside the well-known disk and bulge components. Despite a wealth of evidence for the presence of some gas in galactic halos—including absorption line systems in the spectra of quasars, high-velocity neutral hydrogen clouds in our Galaxy halo, line-emitting ionized hydrogen originating from galactic …