The traditional core accretion model, which suggests planets form from small dust grains, and the alternative gravitational collapse model, where substantial disk mass allows for the direct formation of giant protoplanets. Kinematic evidence from the motion of gas in the disk supports gravitational instability, aligning with theoretical predictions and indicating the presence of a growing planetary embryo.Note that the galaxy marked with a red circle is an ordinary, if strongly barred, galaxy. It is not extremely far in the background, and it has not been lensed as seen from our perspective.
This is Mothra:
Among the transients the team identified, one stood out in particular. Located in a galaxy that existed about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, it is magnified by a factor of at least 4000. The team nicknamed the star system Mothra in a nod to its ‘monster nature’, being both extremely bright and extremely magnified. It joins another lensed star that the researchers previously identified and that they nicknamed Godzilla. Both Godzilla and Mothra are giant monsters known as kaiju in Japanese cinema.
Interestingly, Mothra is also visible in the Hubble observations that were taken nine years earlier. This is unusual, because a very specific alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is needed to magnify a star so greatly. The mutual motions of the star and the cluster should have eventually eliminated that alignment.
The most likely explanation is that there is an additional object within the foreground cluster that is adding more magnification. The team was able to constrain its mass to be between 10 000 and 1 million times the mass of our Sun. The exact nature of this ‘milli-lens’, however, remains unknown. It is possible that the object is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to observe directly.
Statistics: Posted by kiwimellow — Mon Nov 25, 2024 2:12 am — Replies 4 — Views 38837