Not exact matches
Completed in 1980 but operational before then, the VLA was
behind the discoveries
of water ice on Mercury; the complex region surrounding Sagittarius A *, the black hole at the core
of the Milky Way galaxy; and it helped astronomers identify a
distant galaxy already pumping out
stars less than a billion years after the big bang.
A closer look at this beautiful new picture not only allows a very detailed inspection
of the
star - forming spiral arms
of the galaxy, but also reveals the very rich scenery
of the more
distant galaxies scattered
behind the myriad
stars and glowing clouds
of NGC 598.
A chance to get a close look is coming soon: Kervella's team mapped out the system's trajectory and found that in a decade, Alpha Centauri A will pass in front
of a more
distant star and act as a gravitational lens, distorting the light
of the
star behind it.
They also dismissed the possibility
of interference from Alpha Centauri A, the other
star in the binary system, or from an unrelated, more
distant star system that could have just been passing
behind.
That's when telescope observations
of distant stars going
behind Pluto (known as stellar occultations) showed that it had a methane atmosphere, probably rapidly evaporating to space.
Subsequently, however, an even more
distant quasar with a tentative redshift
of z = 6.40 was announced on January 9, 2003, near the SDSS detection limit
of a redshift
of z ~ 6.5 for bright quasars, and other teams
of astronomers detected even more
distant, fast -
star - forming irregular proto - galaxies, including: gravitationally - lensed HCM 6A
behind galaxy cluster Abell 370 with a redshift
of z ~ 6.56, which appears to be converting about 40 Solar - masses into
stars annually; (PhysicsWeb; IFA press release; Hu et al, 2002, in pdf; and erratum); and the possible «superwind - galaxy» LAE J1044 - 0130 (Subaru press release; and Ajiki et al, 2002, in pdf).