LDN 43 - The Cosmic Bat Nebula !
Courtesy:
Matthieu TEQUI /Pontaubert, Bourgogne, Yonne, France,
Gary Imm / Onalaska, Texas, United States
Daniel Stern / Rio Hurtado, Chile
IC 2944
A view of the stellar nursery IC 2944 as seen from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. A new study by European scientists suggests that gravity played a role in saving the infant universe from a collapse induced by the Higgs boson.
Image credit: ESO
Thor's helmet with an SHO "Gold" palette,
Location: DeepSkyChile in Chile,
Date: December 16, 2022,
Credit: ATRIA Team (Olivier, Fabien , Frédéric, David , Julien and Arnaud)
GUM 37 & NGC 3572,
Integration time: 5h
Credit: Aygen Erkaslan / Telescope Live, Location: El Sauce, Chile
"zone of avoidance"
This phantom region, known as the zone of avoidance, is a blank spot on our map of the universe, comprising somewhere between 10% and 20% of the night sky. The reason we can't see it — at least with standard visible light telescopes — is because the Milky Way's bulging center blocks our view of it; the center of our galaxy is so dense with stars, dust and other matter that light from the zone of avoidance gets scattered or absorbed before reaching Earth's telescopes.
However, researchers have had better luck uncovering the zone's secrets with telescopes that can detect infrared radiation — a type of energy that's invisible to human eyes, but powerful enough to shine through dense clouds of gas and dust. Infrared surveys of the zone of avoidance have found evidence of thousands of individual galaxies shining through the cosmic fog, though little is known about the large-scale structures that lurk there.
Now, researchers have combined data from several of those infrared surveys to reveal the most colossal structure ever detected in the zone of avoidance, according to a study published Oct. 28 on the preprint database arXiv.org. (This study has not yet been peer reviewed, though it has been submitted for review to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics).
Located approximately 3 billion light-years from Earth, the mysterious structure appears to be a large cluster of galaxies drawn together by a shared center of gravity. Using observations from the VVV Survey — a survey that studies the Milky Way's central bulge at infrared wavelengths using the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy in Chile — the study authors found evidence of at least 58 galaxies bundled together in a small plot of the zone of avoidance.
Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally-bound objects in the universe; the largest known clusters contain hundreds of thousands of galaxies bunched together. Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell just how wide or massive the newly discovered cluster is, given the vast distances and myriad obstructions sitting between the cluster's stars and Earth.
However, the mere detection of this colossal object shows that the zone of avoidance may not be as inscrutable as was once thought. Future infrared studies — including potential observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, which has already used its infrared camera to take the deepest image of the universe to date — should further help scientists unlock the hidden secrets beyond the Milky Way's bulge.
Courtesy: Physics Astronomy
Ciel Austral (Southern Sky) 240-megapixel image of the Large Magellan Cloud (LMC). Constructed using 4,000 image, the seamless collage required over 1,060 hours of exposures.
The individual photos that make up the 14,400-pixel-wide image were captured between July 2017 and February 2019 using a 160mm refracting telescope at an observatory in Chile that is owned by the photographers.
To see the full size image in all of its glory, head over to the Ciel Austral website.