Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array have revealed a dense cocoon of gas around one of the most extreme cosmic explosions ever seen, showing that a ravenous black hole ripped apart a massive star and then lit up its surroundings with powerful X-rays.
Peering back in time, around 12 billion years, astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found the most distant and direct evidence of scorching gas in a forming galaxy cluster, SPT2349-56. The hot plasma, seen when the Universe was just 1.4 billion years old, is far hotter and more pressurized than current theories predicted for such an early system.
Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered a rare protocluster that was exceptionally bright, all when the Universe was 11 billion years younger. The system, called PJ0846+15 (J0846), is the first strongly lensed protocluster core discovered, revealing how some of the most massive galaxy clusters in the present-day Universe began their lives.
Astronomers have created a detailed forecast of where they expect to observe future stellar explosions in a nearby galaxy, opening a new window into how exploding stars shape the cosmos.