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MXPlank News Letter - 2021-07-17







A ghostly galaxy lacking dark matter






NGC 1052-DF2 resides about 65 million light-years away in the NGC 1052 Group, which is dominated by a massive elliptical galaxy called NGC 1052.

This large, fuzzy-looking galaxy is so diffuse that astronomers can clearly see distant galaxies behind it. This ghostly galaxy is not well-formed. It does not look like a typical spiral galaxy, but it does not look like an elliptical galaxy either. Based on the colours of its globular clusters, the galaxy is about 10 billion years old. However, even the globular clusters are strange: they are twice as large as typical groups of stars.

All of these oddities pale in comparison to the weirdest aspect of this galaxy: NGC 1052-DF2 is missing most, if not all, of its dark matter. The galaxy contains only a tiny fraction of dark matter that astronomers would expect for a galaxy this size. But how it formed is a complete mystery.

Hubble took this image on 16 November 2017 using its Advanced Camera for Surveys.




Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)













A snowstorm of stars







It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling storm in a snow globe.

These stars make up the globular cluster Messier 79, located about 40 000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Lepus (The Hare). Globular clusters are gravitationally bound groupings of up to one million stars. These giant "star globes" contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy. Messier 79 is no exception; it contains about 150 000 stars, packed into an area measuring just roughly 120 light-years across.

This 11.7-billion-year-old star cluster was first discovered by French astronomer Pierre Mechain in 1780. Mechain reported the finding to his colleague Charles Messier, who included it in his catalogue of non-cometary objects: The Messier catalogue. About four years later, using a larger telescope than Messier's, William Herschel was able to resolve the stars in Messier 79 and described it as a "globular star cluster."

In this sparkling Hubble image, Sun-like stars appear yellow-white and the reddish stars are bright giants that are in the final stages of their lives. Most of the blue stars sprinkled throughout the cluster are aging "helium-burning" stars, which have exhausted their hydrogen fuel and are now fusing helium in their cores.



Credit:
NASA and ESA

Acknowledgement:
S. Djorgovski (Caltech) and F. Ferraro (University of Bologna)



















Artist’s impression of 55 Cancri e (close-up)






This artist’s impression shows the exoplanet 55 Cancri e as close-up. Due to its proximity to its parent star, the temperatures on the surface of the planet are thought to reach about 2000 degrees Celsius.

Scientists were able to analyze the atmosphere of 55 Cancri e. It was the first time this was possible for a super-Earth exoplanet.




Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)













Hubble image of the Ring Nebula (Messier 57)






This new image shows the dramatic shape and colour of the Ring Nebula, otherwise known as Messier 57.

From Earth’s perspective, the nebula looks like a simple elliptical shape with a shaggy boundary. However, new observations combining existing ground-based data with new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope data show that the nebula is shaped like a distorted doughnut. This doughnut has a rugby-ball-shaped region of lower-density material slotted into in its central “gap”, stretching towards and away from us.




Credit:
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)