Next week’s night sky:
The December full moon, traditionally known as the Oak Moon, Cold Moon, and Long Nights Moon, always shines in or near the stars of Gemini. Since it’s opposite the sun on this day of the lunar month, the moon is fully illuminated and rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. Full moons during the winter months reach as high in the sky as the summer noonday sun, and cast similar shadows. This is a great time to get a good look at the moon!
Most Distant Galaxy Surprises Astronomers
An international team of astronomers has confirmed the most-distant known galaxy is, in fact, a mind-boggling 13.4 billion light years away, indicating it was shining just 400 million years or so after the Big Bang.
As an added bonus, the team spotted the brief ultraviolet flare of a powerful gamma ray burst in the remote galaxy, a phenomenon never before seen in the extremely early universe.
“The more we learn about the universe’s earliest objects, the better we can understand how the structure of our cosmos was shaped,” said Carnegie researcher and team member Gregory Waith. The observations are described in two papers published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Discovered in space telescope data, the galaxy, known as GN-z11, already was considered the most distant astrophysical object found to date. Astronomers using the Keck 1 telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have now carried out a deep spectroscopic analysis, finding higher-than-expected concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
Along with helping confirm the galaxy’s distance, the spectra would seem to rule out a first-generation galaxy, one in which massive first-generation stars had not had time to live their lives, explode and seed the environment with the heavier elements seen in GN-z11. How the galaxy fits into the early stages of cosmic evolution remains to be seen.
Hubble’s Molten Ring
The narrow galaxy elegantly curving around its spherical companion in this image is a fantastic example of a truly strange and very rare phenomenon. This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, depicts GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax (the Furnace). GAL-CLUS-022058s is the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our universe.
First theorized to exist by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, this object’s unusual shape can be explained by a process called gravitational lensing, which causes light shining from far away to be bent and pulled by the gravity of an object between its source and the observer. In this case, the light from the background galaxy has been distorted into the curve we see by the gravity of the galaxy cluster sitting in front of it. The near exact alignment of the background galaxy with the central elliptical galaxy of the cluster, seen in the middle of this image, has warped and magnified the image of the background galaxy into an almost perfect ring. The gravity from other galaxies in the cluster causes additional distortions.
Objects like these are the ideal laboratories in which to study galaxies that are often too faint and distant to otherwise see without gravitational lensing.
The Christmas Tree Cluster
Visible to the naked eye under good conditions, the Christmas Tree really shines in binoculars or a small telescope. You can find the cluster about 11.5° north-northeast of Betelgeuse, the bright red right shoulder of Orion the Hunter, or 5.5° northeast of the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2239).
This triangular cluster of young, hot stars is just a few million years old. The tree touches the famous Cone Nebula at its tip, while the bright magnitude 4.6 star S Monocerotis sits at the base of its trunk. Keep in mind that, depending on the optics you’re using, the tree may appear sideways or upside-down.
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!