#illustristng collaboration

[photonically-unstoppable]

Porphyrion - record-breaking plasma jet streams, measuring about 23 million light years from end to end (140 times the length of our entire galaxy), ejected from a black hole in a galaxy 7.5 billion light years away. Their ejection began when the universe was half the age it is now; their discovery was announced today in an article in Nature Magazine, spotted by the Low-Frequency Array telescope network.

Universe has some incredible things in it.

Artist's illustration: E Wernquist/D Nelson/IllustrisTNG Collaboration/M Oei/Caltech/PA

[a-typical]

An artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, these jets span roughly 7 megaparsecs, or 23 million light-years. That is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back.

Porphyrion’s jets are estimated to contain the total power of trillions of suns and raise the temperature of surrounding gas by a million degrees Celsius. This means they may have inhibited the formation of not just stars but entire galaxies in the early universe. Their high-speed sprays of magnetized ejecta also could have pierced and filled voids in the cosmic web, the network of matter-rich filaments and matter-sparse cavities that forms the universe’s large-scale structure.

To better assess the impact such jets may have had on the early universe, researchers will need to create a more comprehensive catalog of the structures. The new study surveys just 15 percent of the sky, possibly leaving many more jets yet to be discovered.

E. Wernquist/D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration)/M. Oei (CC BY-NC-ND)

[apod]

2023 May 31

Simulation: A Disk Galaxy Forms Video Credit: TNG Collaboration, MPCDF, FAS Harvard U.; Music: World's Sunrise (YouTube: Jimena Contreras)

Explanation: How did we get here? We know that we live on a planet orbiting a star orbiting a galaxy, but how did all of this form? Since our universe moves too slowly to watch, faster-moving computer simulations are created to help find out. Specifically, this featured video from the IllustrisTNG collaboration tracks gas from the early universe (redshift 12) until today (redshift 0). As the simulation begins, ambient gas falls into and accumulates in a region of relatively high gravity. After a few billion years, a well-defined center materializes from a strange and fascinating cosmic dance. Gas blobs -- some representing small satellite galaxies -- continue to fall into and become absorbed by the rotating galaxy as the present epoch is reached and the video ends. For the Milky Way Galaxy, however, big mergers may not be over -- recent evidence indicates that our large spiral disk Galaxy will collide and coalesce with the slightly larger Andromeda spiral disk galaxy in the next few billion years.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230531.html

[dwcouch]

An artist’s concept of Porphyrion, a jet of material 23 million light-years long that dates back to a time when the universe was less than half its present age. Credit...E. Wernquist/D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration)/M. Oei

OUT THERE

This Black Hole Has a Cosmic Wingspan

Astronomers have discovered a black hole emitting energy in jets longer than the width of 140 Milky Way galaxies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/science/space/black-hole-m87-energy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Nk4.WCTE.lqTrpWk9BULL&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

[misspepita]

via NASA https://ift.tt/xyZCXMz

How did we get here? We know that we live on a planet orbiting a star orbiting a galaxy, but how did all of this form? Since our universe moves too slowly to watch, faster-moving computer simulations are created to help find out. Specifically, this featured video from the IllustrisTNG collaboration tracks gas from the early universe (redshift 12) until today (redshift 0). As the simulation begins, ambient gas falls into and accumulates in a region of relatively high gravity. After a few billion years, a well-defined center materializes from a strange and fascinating cosmic dance. Gas blobs -- some representing small satellite galaxies -- continue to fall into and become absorbed by the rotating galaxy as the present epoch is reached and the video ends. For the Milky Way Galaxy, however, big mergers may not be over -- recent evidence indicates that our large spiral disk Galaxy will collide and coalesce with the slightly larger Andromeda spiral disk galaxy in the next few billion years.

[insight-analysis]

IllustrisTNG - Most perfect model of the universe

#Astronomy, #Astrophysics, #Black_Holes, #Cosmological, #Cosmology, #Cosmos, #Dark_Matter, #Evolution, #Formation, #Galaxies, #Galaxy_Formation, #Heidelberg, #Illustris, #Illustristng, #Illustristng_Collaboration, #Interstellar, #Light_Years, #Magnetic_Fields, #Physics, #Researcher, #Supermassive, #Tng_Collaboration, #Tng100, #Universe

[the-telescope-times]

A view of the present-day cosmic web 300 million light-years across, as modeled by IllustrisTNG. Galaxies (gold) have blown off shocked gas (white). TNG COLLABORATION

Galaxy simulations are at last matching reality—and producing surprising insights into cosmic evolution

Philip Hopkins, a theoretical astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, likes to prank his colleagues. An expert in simulating the formation of galaxies, Hopkins sometimes begins his talks by projecting images of his creations next to photos of real galaxies and defying his audience to tell them apart. "We can even trick astronomers," says Hopkins, a leader of FIRE, the Feedback in Realistic Environments simulation. "Of course, it's not a guarantee that the models are accurate, but it's sort of a gut check that you're on the right track."

For decades, scientists have tried to simulate how the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe arose from clouds of gas after the big bang. But in the past few years, thanks to faster computers and better algorithms, the simulations have begun to produce results that accurately capture both the details of individual galaxies and their overall distribution of masses and shapes. "The whole thing has reached this little golden age where progress is coming faster and faster," says Tiziana Di Matteo, a numerical cosmologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a leader of the BlueTides simulation.

As the fake universes improve, their role also is changing. For decades, information flowed one way: from the astronomers studying real galaxies to the modelers trying to simulate them. Now, insight is flowing the other way, too, with the models helping guide astronomers, says Stephen Wilkins, an extragalactic astronomer at the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K., who works on BlueTides. "In the past the simulations were always trying to keep up with the observations," says Wilkins, who is using BlueTides to predict what NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will see when it launches in 2020 and peers deep into space and far back in time. "Now we can predict things that we haven't observed."

For example, the models suggest that the earliest galaxies were oddly pickle-shaped, that wafer-thin spiral galaxies are surprisingly rugged in the face of collisions, and that to explain the evolution of the universe, galaxies must form stars far more slowly than astrophysicists expected.

The simulations also sound a cautionary note. Some cosmologists hope galaxy formation will ultimately turn out to be a relatively simple process, governed by a few basic rules. However, modelers say their faux universes suggest that, like maturing teenagers, galaxies are unpredictable. It's hard, for example, to tell why one turns into a graceful spiral but another evolves into a blob. "It's clear from everything that we've done that the physics of galaxy formation is incredibly messy," Wilkins says.

Read more ~ ScienceMag.org

[mindthump]

Astronomers want your help to find cosmic jellyfish galaxies https://ift.tt/3wXlqlg

Eight examples for jellyfish galaxies. Images like these are presented to the participants of the new Zooniverse project for classification. IllustrisTNG collaboration

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and there’s much we still have to learn about how they form and grow. One open mystery is around the formation of jellyfish galaxies, named that because of their long tails of gas which look like trailing jellyfish tentacles. Now, a new project is inviting the public to help research these cosmic jellies by identifying targets for further study.

Jellyfish galaxies form in galaxy clusters, which are groups of galaxies that also have hot gas in the space between them. It is this hot intergalactic dust that creates a “headwind” when a fast-moving galaxy passes through it, which causes the galaxy to leave a trail of gas behind it as it moves. But there are many unknowns about these galaxies, such as how quickly the tails form and how long they last, or how big a cluster has to be to support them.

To address these questions, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have simulated a virtual universe using computers so they can look at galaxies on a very large scale as part of their Cosmological Jellyfish project. But before they can study the jellyfish galaxies in their simulations, they need to identify them — and that’s something that is easy for a human to do, but hard for a computer. Humans are excellent at pattern recognition, so they can easily identify things that look like jellyfish, and the researchers hope to use the input of the public to help them spot and label their galaxies.

“There’s nothing quite like the human eye to identify unique shapes,” said one of the researchers on the project website. “We hope you’ll join this endeavor to look for Jellyfish galaxies so we can understand them better!”

The project consists of 38,000 images that need to be searched for jellyfish. Volunteers can use the Zooniverse platform to see images of galaxies which they then identify as showing or not showing a jellyfish galaxy. Each image will be classified by at least twenty participants to get the most consistent results possible, then the researchers will know which galaxies they should focus their study on.

If you’d like to participate, you can head to the Zooniverse website and take a tutorial, then start classifying.

[sciencebulletin]

Hungry galaxies grow fat on the flesh of their neighbours

Galaxies grow large by eating their smaller neighbours, new research reveals. Exactly how massive galaxies attain their size is poorly understood, not least because they swell over billions of years. But now a combination of observation and modelling from researchers led by Dr. Anshu Gupta from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D) has provided a vital clue. In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, the scientists combine data from an Australian project called the Multi-Object Spectroscopic Emission Line (MOSEL) survey with a cosmological modelling program running on some of the world's largest supercomputers in order to glimpse the forces that create these ancient galactic monsters. By analysing how gases within galaxies move, Dr. Gupta said, it is possible to discover the proportion of stars made internally—and the proportion effectively cannibalised from elsewhere. "We found that in old massive galaxies—those around 10 billion light years away from us—things move around in lots of different directions," she said. "That strongly suggests that many of the stars within them have been acquired from outside. In other words, the big galaxies have been eating the smaller ones." Because light takes time to travel through the universe, galaxies further away from the Milky Way are seen at an earlier point in their existence. Dr. Gupta's team found that observation and modelling of these very distant galaxies revealed much less variation in their internal movements. "We then had to work out why 'older', closer big galaxies were so much more disordered than the 'younger', more distant ones," said second author ASTRO 3-D's Dr. Kim-Vy Tran, who like Dr. Gupta, is based at the UNSW Sydney. "The most likely explanation is that in the intervening billions of years the surviving galaxies have grown fat and disorderly through incorporating smaller ones. I think of it as big galaxies having a constant case of the cosmic munchies." The research team—which included scientists from other Australian universities plus institutions in the US, Canada, Mexico, Belgium and the Netherlands—ran their modelling on a specially designed set of simulations known as IllustrisTNG. This is a multi-year, international project that aims to build a series of large cosmological models of how galaxies form. The program is so big that it has to run simultaneously on several of world's most powerful supercomputers. "The modelling showed that younger galaxies have had less time to merge with other ones," said Dr. Gupta. "This gives a strong clue to what happens during an important stage of their evolution." Provided by: ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3D (ASTRO 3D) More information: Anshu Gupta et al. MOSEL Survey: Tracking the Growth of Massive Galaxies at 2 . The Astrophysical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab7b6d Image: Simulation showing distribution of dark matter density overlayed with the gas density. This image cleanly shows the gas channels connecting the central galaxy with its neighbours. Credit: Gupta et al/ASTRO 3D/ IllustrisTNG collaboration. Read the full article

[gadgets360technews]

Monstrous old cannibal galaxies have 'constant case of the cosmic munchies'

Monstrous old cannibal galaxies have ‘constant case of the cosmic munchies’

[ad_1]

This simulation shows dark matter density overlayed with the gas density. The gases connect the galaxy in the middle with its neighbors.

Gupta et al/ASTRO 3D/IllustrisTNG collaboration.

Space can be a ruthless realm. A research team investigated how some ancient, massive galaxies got so big. Turns out they’ve probably been binge-eating…

[royalvoxpost]

#Space : Astrophysicists release the most advanced #universe model of its kind, and explain how black holes shape the cosmos https://t.co/8ucB3hS6uX Press release : https://t.co/Ze4oUiZZMf 📷: IllustrisTNG collaboration https://t.co/BDpzamQmpU

#Space : Astrophysicists release the most advanced #universe model of its kind, and explain how black holes shape the cosmoshttps://t.co/8ucB3hS6uX Press release : https://t.co/Ze4oUiZZMf 📷: IllustrisTNG collaboration pic.twitter.com/BDpzamQmpU

— The Royal Vox Post (@RoyalVoxPost) February 1, 2018

via Twitter https://twitter.com/RoyalVoxPost February 01, 2018 at 03:29PM