Latest news from DAWN
To better understand observations of the most distant galaxies, an international team of astronomers has built a sample of local galaxies which can be studied in much higher detail. In a newly published study they show how the amount of light that escapes from a galaxy is connected to its physical properties. The result has implications for how we interpret observations of galaxies in the early Universe.
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Congratulations to Charlotte Mason who has just been awarded the L’Oréal-UNESCO’s For Women in Science Prize.
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Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic explosions in the Universe, marking the end of a star’s life. A particularly bright burst was recently detected by several space telescopes. A team of scientists led by astronomers at the Cosmic Dawn Center measured the exact distance to the burst, allowing them to calculate the total energy released: During its duration of just five minutes it released much more energy than our Sun has emitted throughout its lifetime of 4½ billion years, making the burst the single most energetic ever detected.
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Although the magnificent explosion of colliding neutron stars is visible across most of the Universe, the resulting fireball is much too small to study in detail. But now astronomers from the Cosmic Dawn Center has found a way to measure the shape of the explosion. The surprising result provides new insight into fundamental physics relating to the formation of heavy elements and the birth a black holes. The study has just been published in the scientific journal Nature.
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Astronomers from the Cosmic Dawn Center have unveiled the nature of the densest region of galaxies seen with the James Webb Space telescope in the early Universe. They find it to be likely the progenitor of massive, Milky Way-like galaxy, seen at a time where it is still assembling from smaller galaxies.
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Congratulations to Bitten Gullberg who has just been awarded DKK 5.5 million by the Villum Foundation through their Young Investigator Programme, funding her project “Exploring the infLuence of the Local envIronment on the Production of Stars In Starbursts” (ELLIPSIS).
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Charlotte Mason has received the “Semper Ardens: Accelerate” grant from the Carlsberg Foundation of DKK 5,000,000. The grant will be used to investigate how, and when, the first stars in the Universe formed.
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After half a year of frequent new candidates for the most distant galaxy ever seen, astronomers have finally acquired the conclusive evidence: a spectrum, allowing the researchers to measure the exact wavelengths of the light emitted from the galaxies in the past, and hence to determine their distances unambiguously. Four galaxies have been confirmed, with the most distant one seen only 320 million years after the Big Bang.
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Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe, resulting from either collapsing stars or from the collision of two compact stellar remnants. But a recent discovery fits in neither, or both, of these categories, challenging our understanding of their source. Astronomers from the Niels Bohr Institute played an important role in the study that may lead us to revise our theories about these violent events.
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Less than a week after the James Webb Space Telescope was ready for science, the first reports of discoveries of galaxies at record distances and, consequently, at record-early times appeared in preprints. Even more remarkably, these galaxies seem to be so massive that they challenge our understanding of how structure forms in the Universe. Now the two first of these reports have undergone the mandatory peer-review and have been accepted for publication in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, substantiating the robustness of the result. However, astronomers are still waiting for the conclusive evidence — spectroscopy.
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