Researchers from LMU, the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), and the ORIGINS Data Science Lab (ODSL) have made an important breakthrough in the analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. Using physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), they have managed to model the complex light scattering in the atmospheres of exoplanets with greater precision … Read more
A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes. An international team, led by Penn State researchers, using the NIRSpec instrument aboard JWST as part of the … Read more
A group of researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia have discovered a potential “cosmic glitch” in the universe’s gravity, explaining its strange behaviour on a cosmic scale. For the last 100 years, physicists have relied upon Albert Einstein’s theory of “general relativity” to explain how gravity works throughout the … Read more
A new investigation into an obscure class of galaxies known as Compact Symmetric Objects, or CSOs, has revealed that these objects are not entirely what they seem. CSOs are active galaxies that host supermassive black holes at their cores. Out of these monstrous black holes spring two jets traveling in opposite directions at nearly the … Read more
Mason Leist is working remotely — 127 million light-years from Earth — on images of a supermassive black hole in his office at the UTSA Department of Physics and Astronomy. The UTSA Graduate Research Assistant led a study, published in The Astronomical Journal, on the best method to improve images obtained by the James Webb … Read more
A whirling image features a bright spiral galaxy known as MCG-01-24-014, which is located about 275 million light-years from Earth. In addition to being a well-defined spiral galaxy, MCG-01-24-014 has an extremely energetic core known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and is categorized as a Type-2 Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies, along with quasars, host … Read more
