NAOJ – Astronomy Now

Tracing the cosmic web with star-forming galaxies in the distant Universe

3 February 2017 Stephen Clark

A research group led by Hiroshima University has revealed a picture of the increasing fraction of massive star-forming galaxies in the distant universe.

ALMA starts observing the Sun

17 January 2017 Stephen Clark

New images taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile have revealed otherwise invisible details of our Sun, including a new view of the dark, contorted centre of a sunspot that is nearly twice the diameter of the Earth.

Potentially habitable super-Earth K2-3d observed transiting parent star

28 November 2016 Astronomy Now

A group of researchers has observed the first ground-based transit observation of K2-3d — a potentially Earth-like extrasolar planet supposedly within the habitable zone around a bright M-dwarf host star 147 light-years away — using the multi-band imager MuSCAT on the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory’s 1.88-metre telescope.

Record-breaking dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way discovered

21 November 2016 Astronomy Now

An international team has found an extremely faint dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. Named Virgo I, the galaxy lies 280,000 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. The galaxy may well be the faintest satellite galaxy yet found.

Ancient eye in the sky reveals galaxies

26 July 2016 Astronomy Now

A gravitational lens system has been discovered by undergraduate students examining images from the 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope’s Hyper Suprime-Cam. Dubbed the “Eye of Horus” due to the system’s uncanny resemblance to the sacred eye of the ancient Egyptian goddess, it is formed by a galaxy 7 billion light-years from the Earth bending the light from two more galaxies directly behind it.

‘Birthplace’ of a fast radio burst located for the first time

25 February 2016 Astronomy Now

An international team of scientists led by a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project scientist has for the first time managed to identify the location of a fast radio burst using a combination of radio and optical telescopes, allowing them to confirm the current cosmological model of the distribution of matter in the universe.

ALMA spots monstrous baby galaxies cradled in dark matter

6 December 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have discovered a nest of colossal baby galaxies 11.5 billion light-years away. The young galaxies seem to reside at the junction of gigantic filaments in a web of dark matter. These findings are important for understanding how enormous galaxies like these are formed and how they evolve into huge elliptical galaxies.

Dark matter map begins to reveal the universe’s early history

3 July 2015 Astronomy Now

Astronomers using the 870 million-pixel Hyper Suprime-Cam camera on the 8.2-metre Subaru telescope in Hawaii have begun a wide-area survey of the distribution of dark matter in the universe.

Calm regions protect organic molecules around a supermassive black hole

27 February 2015 Astronomy Now

Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have discovered zones where certain organic molecules somehow endure the intense X-rays and ultraviolet radiation near the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy Messier 77.

Japanese “ATERUI” becomes world’s fastest astronomical supercomputer

1 December 2014 Astronomy Now

Capable of performing one thousand trillion calculations per second, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s upgraded “ATERUI” Cray XC30 supercomputer now offers the world’s best performance for astronomical simulations.