The first rung of the #extragalactic “cosmological distance ladder” is based on calculating the distance to the Cepheids – “breathing” stars, whose changing size sets both how fast they pulse and how bright they are, locking their period and luminosity together.
#GalaxyDynamics
Meet Niloofar Pourjafari, our second (and final) March 2026 GradHighlight ✨ Niloofar is a PhD student at the University of Calgary studying galactic magnetic fields using radio observations 🌌 Check out her research here: casca.ca?page_id=22650
#astronomy #astrosci #extragalactic
Fig. 11 of Kam et al. 2026.
One key finding. A steep single-powerlaw Faraday rotation measure profile.
🧪🔭
#extragalactic
#radioastronomy
NEW: My former student, now postdoc at ASIAA, Minchul Kam led a massive study of the gas distribution within the Bondi radius of the AGN 3C84, using KVN radio polarimetry.
🧪🔭
#extragalactic
#radioastronomy
Last Friday I learned that my #JWSTCycle5 proposal was approved: 107 hours to do the first tomographic map of the IGM at the end of Reionisation - quite ambitious! 🥳
We will also collect >2000 PRISM spectra as fillers in COSMOS for legacy science. #extragalactic
www.stsci.edu/jwst/science...
What a masterpiece of processing: blazing blue-white core in the center (those are the hottest young stars), then reddish-orange wispy bits everywhere that look like tarantula legs. Pitch-black sky behind packed with thousands of stars. It grabs you even if you know zero about space.
🧵1/5
This magnificent, composite image from multiple data sources ( #Hubble, #ESO, #JWST, amateur data), assembled and processed by Robert Gendler, shows the Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus, NGC 2070). 🔭
➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap22091...
🧪 ⚛️ #extragalactic #Universe #Astronomy #Science #space
I'm quoted mis-quoting the Princess Bride in this CNN article on Li et al.'s discovery of a galaxy that appears to be 99% composed of dark matter. #extragalactic
"Mostly dark is slightly bright"
www.cnn.com/2026/03/03/s...
This paper has now been published in final journal format, and is featured on the cover of this week's print issue.
☄️🔭 #extragalactic
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
This galaxy is one of the most enigmatic in our PHANGS survey✨🔭🧪☄ Today's @apod.shinyakato.dev compares our Webb infrared and Hubble optical images...
(Find these color-composite images, science-ready imaging data, plus catalogs of star clusters at archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/phangs ) #extragalactic
#paperday #Extragalactic What determines whether a galaxy can become a jellyfish galaxy? Thanks to new Meerkat data, we now propose that this may be due to a combination of supersonic orbits and interactions with the magnetic field of the galaxy cluster. More at arxiv.org/abs/2602.21821
As an example science application, they apply the code to a JWST survey searching for distant galaxies. By improving the depth of the photometry in every band, they treble the number of z>9 sources identified in the survey field.
☄️🔭 #astrocode #extragalactic
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
What are the #extragalactic 'little red dots' that appear in observations of the distant Universe? In a Perspective piece, Jorryt Matthee (@jorryt.bsky.social) discusses the evidence that they are obscured accreting supermassive black holes in low-mass galaxies. ☄️🔭
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The following caption comes from this web page: https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/macs-j04175-1154-wide-field-nircam-image/ "A cosmic question mark appears amid a powerful gravitational lens in the James Webb Space Telescope’s wide-field view of the galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154. Gravitational lensing occurs when something is so massive, like this galaxy cluster, that it warps the fabric of space-time itself, creating a natural funhouse-mirror effect that also magnifies galaxies behind it. The rarely seen type of lensing captured here, which astronomers term hyperbolic umbilic, created five repeated images of one galaxy pair. The red, elongated member of this pair traces the familiar shape of a question mark across the sky due to the distortion, with another unrelated galaxy happening to be in just the right space-time to appear like the question mark’s dot – especially for humans who love to recognize familiar shapes and patterns."
🧵
In case you missed it, here’s the #JWST wide-field view of the huge galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154, known for its stunning gravitational lensing effects and its wild ongoing merger dance. 🔭 🧪 ⚛️
➡️ webbtelescope.org/contents/new...
#cosmology #extragalactic #space #Astronomy #universe
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Should I Stay or Should I Go? Clumps and Inward Migration Something is missing in the middle. In JWST JADES galaxies, young clumps drop out in the inner regions, while clump structure shifts from t...
#Daily #Paper #Summaries #Clumps #cosmic #noon […]
[Original post on astrobites.org]
Paper day: I am extremely happy to announce our major discovery concerning the mysterious emergence of the first massive galaxies when the Universe was only 10% its current age:
www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/pressrelease...
#radioastronomy #extragalactic #astrosci 📡☄️🔭🧪
New X-GAP paper on arXiv led by Ramananda Santra (NCRA-TIFR), studying old AGN plasma in galaxy groups with uGMRT, LOFAR & XMM-Newton.
Found beautifully messy radio morphologies, showing the important role that group environment plays in the AGN feedback process.
#astro #extragalactic #radioastro
Looks like it needs to be just #Extragalactic. Go to the original post to read the thread describing the results
Feed the Fire, Fade the Metals Are cosmic clumps “homegrown”, or fueled by fresh inflow? Today’s authors find that star-forming clumps are usually more metal-poor than the disks around them. ...
#Daily #Paper #Summaries #Clumps #cosmic #noon #extragalactic […]
[Original post on astrobites.org]
That should be #Extragalactic.
Kader, @justtheletteru.bsky.social et al. use multi-wavelength observations to show a precessing jet in an active galaxy is driving a gas outflow. This galactic feedback is removing enough material to affect the star formation rate.
☄️ #extragalactic #AAS247
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
today! 🔭✨🧪☄️
#exoplanets
#extragalactic
#cosmology
“The Habitable Worlds Observatory is exactly the kind of bold, forward-leaning science that only NASA can undertake...” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman...
🔭✨🧪🧵☄️
#exoplanets
#extragalactic
A paper that currently sits on 111 citations.
Someone hurry up and cite this so I can stand on 2 legs again. #extragalactic 🧪🔭 #academicsky 🏏
A deep-space image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a small patch of sky filled with thousands of distant galaxies as faint, diffuse spots and streaks in shades of blue, white, and subtle reds against a black background. An inset box zooms in on the reddish, compact galaxy Virgil, seen as it existed 800 million years after the Big Bang, highlighting its hidden supermassive black hole shrouded in dust.
🧵
Ever wonder what the baby universe looked like—just 800 million years after the Big Bang?
JWST has given us an amazing glimpse via a galaxy called Virgil, hidden in the iconic Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.
➡️ news.arizona.edu/news/monster...
🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #science #cosmology #JWST
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Of course I forgot: 🔭☄️ #extragalactic
The image features Messier 106, a big spiral galaxy. Its center glows bright white from a huge black hole gobbling gas. Blue arms full of young stars sweep out wide, crossed by dark red dust lanes and pink hydrogen clouds near the middle. Faint reddish extra arms hint at hidden jets. It stretches approximately 135,000 light-years across in the dark sky.
🧵
Here is Messier 106 (or NGC 4258), a true cosmic marvel in the constellation Canes Venatici.
Image Credit: NASA, ESO , NAOJ, Giovanni Paglioli; Assembling and Processing: R. Colombari and R. Gendler
➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap19031...
🔭 🧪 #science #universe #extragalactic #astronomy
1/5
🧵
Admire this fascinating JWST picture.
The cluster MACSJ0159.2-0849, here featured, is a monster made of hundreds of galaxies, ~4.5 billion light-years away.
But the real magic? This galaxy cluster works as a gigantic, natural magnifying glass.
🔭 🧪 #extragalactic #cosmology
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