News by Subject Space & Planetary

At the heart of almost every sufficiently massive galaxy there is a black hole whose gravitational field, although very intense, affects only a small region around the center of the galaxy. Even though these objects are thousands of millions of times smaller than their host galaxies our current view is that the universe can be understood only if the evolution of galaxies is regulated by the activity of these black holes, because without them the observed properties of the galaxies cannot be explained.

A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has completed the first census of molecular clouds in the nearby Universe. The study produced the first images of nearby galaxies with the same sharpness and quality as optical imaging and revealed that stellar nurseries do not all look and act the same. In fact, they're as diverse as the people, homes, neighborhoods, and regions that make up our own world.

Scientists have developed a new neural network capable of detecting coronal holes based on data from space observations. The new application opens up opportunities for improving the accuracy of space weather forecasting and provides valuable information for studying solar cycles.

A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, and the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope to measure the atomic hydrogen gas content of galaxies 9 billion years ago. The new result is a confirmation of the group's earlier result, where they had measured the atomic hydrogen content of galaxies 8 billion years ago, and pushes our understanding of galaxies to even earlier in the universe.

No one knows what happened in the universe for its first 400,000 years, but a new paper suggests discovering the hypothetical particle axion could shed light on the early history of the universe. What's more, current dark matter experiments may have already detected it in its data.