Free Republic

Europe’s ultra-powerful new WEAVE telescope, undergoing its inaugural ‘first-light’ instrument activation, recorded a collision between galaxies in a region of deep space called Stephan’s Quintet, where one of the galaxies was traveling at two million miles per hour. Designed to study the composition of stars and galaxies, the William Herschel Telescope is a 20-million Euro collaboration between France, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, and Spain, with the latter hosting the actual facility in La Palma. The facility’s Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) wide-field spectrograph’s Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) is the first of the telescope’s instruments to be activated and...

The known Universe just got a lot bigger. A new map of the night sky published Tuesday charts hundreds of thousands of previously unknown galaxies discovered using a telescope that can detect light sources optical instruments cannot see. The international team behind the unprecedented space survey said their discovery literally shed new light on some of the Universe's deepest secrets, including the physics of black holes and how clusters of galaxies evolve. "This is a new window on the universe," Cyril Tasse, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was involved in the project, told AFP. "When we saw the...