Astro Blog

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: For years, astronomers thought it was the Milky Way’s destiny to collide with its near neighbor the Andromeda galaxy a few billion years from now. But a new simulation finds a 50% chance the impending crunch will end up a near-miss, at least for the next 10 billion years. ...It’s been known that Andromeda is heading toward our home Galaxy since 1912, when astronomer Vesto Slipher noted that its light is blue-shifted.... ...It wasn’t until the era of orbiting observatories that astronomers could judge Andromeda’s overall velocity in 3D.... It was, they calculated, heading pretty much straight at the Milky Way at a speed of 110 kilometers per second. ...A  study from 2008  suggested a Milky Way–Andromeda merger was inevitable within the next 5 billion years...ending up in...the resulting elliptical, which the researchers dub “Milkomeda.” The Milky Way, seen today as a bright band across the sky, would be replaced by a “milky blob” markin...

By Dennis Overbye , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Since the James Webb Space Telescope began operating two years ago, astronomers have been using it to leapfrog one another millions of years into the past, back toward the moment they call cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were formed. Last month, an international team doing research as the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, said it had identified the earliest, most distant galaxy yet found — [JADES-GS-z14-0] a banana-shaped blob of color measuring 1,600 light-years across. It was already shining with intense starlight when the universe was in its relative infancy, at only 290 million years old, the astronomers said. ...the wavelength of light from JADES-GS-z14-0 had been stretched more than 15-fold by the expansion of the universe (a redshift of 14 to use astronomical jargon), similar to the way a siren’s pitch becomes lower as it speeds away. That means light has been coming toward us for 13.5 billion ...