Unveiling the 'Ghost' Baryonic Matter
A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has shed light on one of the most elusive components of the universe: the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). This "ghost" form of ordinary matter, long hypothesized but rarely detected, is thought to account for a significant portion of the universe's missing baryons — the matter that makes up stars, planets, and galaxies.
eROSITA unveils asymmetries in temperature and shape of our Local Hot Bubble
Our Solar System dwells in a low-density environment called the Local Hot Bubble (LHB), filled by a tenuous, million-degree hot gas emitting dominantly in soft X-rays. A team led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) used the eROSITA All-Sky Survey data and found a large-scale temperature gradient in this bubble, possibly linked with past supernova explosions that expanded and reheated the bubble.
Zoom into the first page of Euclid’s great cosmic atlas
Euclid reveals the first deep view into the cosmos, spanning an area of 500 full moons in the sky.
The cosmic-ray ionization rate in the local Milky Way is ten times lower than previously thought
An international group of astrophysicists, led by MPE scientists Marta Obolentseva, Alexei Ivlev, Kedron Silsbee, and Paola Caselli, have revisited the long-standing problem of evaluating the rate at which cosmic rays ionize gas in the interstellar medium.
Hyper-luminous, Yet Surprisingly Organized
The galaxy PJ0116-24 lives about 10 billion years ago and appears about 10,000 times brighter in the infrared than our Milky Way. It belongs to a rare population of so-called hyper-luminous infrared galaxies (HyLIRG), which are usually formed by the collision of several galaxies. Members of the Infrared Group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) including Daizhong Liu and Natascha M. Förster Schreiber, together with researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other international institutes, now showed that a HyLIRG can also arise in a massive turbulent rotating disk within a single galaxy, where the gas is organized in a structured way. This finding was made possible through new observations including from the novel ERIS instrument at the ESO Very Large Telescope, built by a consortium also led by the MPE Infrared Group, and strong magnification caused by a massive elliptical galaxy that lies between us and PJ0116-24. This galaxy acts as a gravitational lens stretching PJ0116-24 in an “Einstein ring” and making it appear 17 times brighter.
JWST sheds Light on the Journey of Cosmic Icy Grains
Using the JWST, a team of researchers including Paola Caselli and Michela Giuliano from MPE, have probed deep into dense cloud cores, revealing details of interstellar ice that were previously unobservable. The study focuses on the Chamaeleon I region, using JWST’s NIRCam to measure spectroscopic lines towards hundreds of stars behind the cloud.
