An international team led by University of Cape Town (UCT) astronomers has revealed the true, massive scale of the Vela Supercluster, a gargantuan cosmic structure previously hidden in a blind spot behind the Milky Way. Utilizing South Africa’s world-class MeerKAT radio telescope and the Southern African Large Telescope (Salt), researchers have finally pierced through the…
An illustration of the distant galaxy eight billion light-years away (red), magnified by an unrelated foreground disk galaxy, resulting in a red ring. (Image source: Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy) Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected. This is according to the South African…
A telescope in Chile has captured a stunning new picture of a grand and graceful cosmic butterfly. The National Science Foundation’s NoirLab released the picture on Wednesday. The glowing “wings” appear to be bursting in the image. While the bipolar nebula goes by the monikers Butterfly Nebula, Bug Nebula or Caldwell 69, its official name…
