Simulations first to reveal fundamental plane of star formation

Galaxy formation involves many inter-linked physical processes at any given time: the rate at which the galaxy’s halo accretes mass from the intergalactic medium, the rate of shocking and cooling of this gas onto the galaxy, and the conversion of gas in the...

Large scale galaxy motions match expectations for dark matter

For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding – most galaxies are moving away from each other. When we measure the motion of a distant galaxy, the overall expansion of the universe is, in most cases, by far the dominant contributor to...

SAMI hexabundles probe biases in local star formation rates

Over the past few decades, studies into the evolution of galaxies have been reliant on data that has come from observing galaxies with individual fibre optics. The light from a galaxy travels down the fibre into a spectrograph where it is split into all of its...

Ionospheric effects not detrimental to EoR detection from ground

The Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) is the time in the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies formed and re-ionised the neutral hydrogen. Indirect information about the EoR has been obtained from the Cosmic Microwave Background and spectra of the distant...

Weighing galaxies to find a more Fundamental Plane

Early-type galaxies are thought to have a very simple structure, and therefore their properties ought to follow well-defined scaling relations. The most prominent of these is the Fundamental Plane. Under the assumption that galaxies are dynamically relaxed systems,...