First Hubble press release of the year
The COSMOS project is a multi-wavelength survey of a 2 degree field, using, well, basically everything we got.
They have cool results.
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the Massive Black Holes workshop at KITP continues, with another Black Hole Pairs session
Mike Eracleous kicks off: Observational Searches for Close Supermassive Binary Black Holes
emission line signatures of close (~ sub-parsec) supermassive binary black holes
cf "A Large Systematic Search for…
Awesome combined image from Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra, showing deep view of the centre of the Milky Way, in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy.
From Hubblesite.org
Annotated image (click for larger version)
Full image collection at Hubblesite.org
Tricolore (click for larger…
"I'd rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are;
because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star.
I'd rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far;
for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are." -Milton Berle
Welcome to Messier Monday, where we pick one of the 110…
So far indeed. It is blobbish and small, but interesting.
From NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. - By combining the power of NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature's own natural "zoom lenses" in space, astronomers have set a new record for finding the most distant galaxy seen in the…
I wonder where the colors come from? The ACS data was a single orbit in F814W. The colors must come from the ground, (which may explain why all of the galaxies seem to have a single color.)
It would be nice if someone could do something scientifically interesting with their dark matter map.
The COSMOS survey is very, very scientifically interesting. It shows large clumps of dark mass in regions of no visible matter. This may indicate that the "voids" seen between galaxies are not empty. This could be a huge amount of mass, enough to cast doubt on counts of "dark" stuff.
"The existence of large clumps of isolated dark matter and visible matter flies in the face of everything we know," says cosmologist Carlos Frenk of the University of Durham, UK.
"There are plausible explanations for small areas of dark matter and visible matter existing in isolation," NATURE continues, "but these theories can't explain the large features visible on the COSMOS map."
Someone predicted this in a paper posted back in '004.
Obviously I need to make myself clearer.
Massey has been discussing this mass map for a few months now. At no point have I heard a discussion of the significance of the detection of the mass with no light associated. In fact, in the paper, the authors argue that it could be a problem with their data, as these measurements are very difficult to do.
Second, there appear to be baryons without any mass. Weak lensing smooths in the plane of the sky with a pretty large kernel. This could easily merge together smaller mass lumps into one average lump at the wrong place. So, I am suspicious of results low mass overdensities. Clusters, such as the bullet cluster, are much easier as the signal is an order of magnitude stronger.
Of course, I could be overly critical. Letters to Nature are very frustrating in this regard as it is nearly impossible to explain enough about the data, even with the Supplemental materials.