O ne of the key challenges in astronomy is to measure accurate distances to celestial objects. Knowing distances is crucial since it allows us to measure physical properties such as size, mass and luminosity. Since we can’t go out and use a tape-measure, a range of different approaches have been developed. Many of these approaches rely on using “standard candles”. Standard candles are objects (for example stars or supernovae) for which we know their intrinsic ”true” brightness. Once we know this, then their observed brightness compared to their intrinsic brightness gives us a distance to the
In the standard Lambda cold dark matter (Lambda-CDM) cosmology, galaxies grow by gradually accreting material and through mergers with other galaxies. This scenario successfully explains many large-scale cosmic structures, yet it struggles to account for the existence of numerous massive spiral galaxies in the local Universe that lack a prominent central bulge, pure disc systems, in the local Universe. Understanding how these galaxies form and survive is also essential for placing our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, into context, as it also hosts a low-mass bulge. In this study, we analyse 22
An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), has unveiled a breakthrough explanation for the origin of tiny, jet-like plasma ejections in the solar atmosphere, known as “nanojets.” These elusive events which are recently discovered by the NASA’s solar telescopes are thought to play an important role in heating and sustaining the solar corona at temperatures above one million Kelvin. Why Study Nanojets? For decades, solar physicists have been puzzled by the so-called “coronal heating problem.” While the Sun