Galactic timelines and cosmic webs
NASA recently launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to study things like dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
And soon, scientists will be using that same telescope for another survey -- to look at the evolution of galaxies.
The project called the Grism Reionization and Cosmic Evolution Survey, or GRACE, will look at galaxies during key moments during their history to study how they’ve changed since their creation.
Greg Rudnick, a professor at the University of Kansas in the department of physics and astronomy, said the project includes looking at how the environments of galaxies change in different areas of what’s called the cosmic web.
“Just like people are not distributed uniformly across the United States, they're clumped in urban centers, they're in rural environments, they have highways connecting them, their suburbs; galaxies are also spread out in that same way but in three dimensions,” Rudnick said.
Rudnick said it’s all connected, and using these observations and different methods like spectroscopy, they can make a three-dimensional map of the universe to better understand those clusters in the cosmic web.
“They've got giant groups of hundreds of thousands of galaxies that we call galaxy clusters,” Rudnick said. “They've got groups which have tens to hundreds of galaxies. They've got isolated galaxies like a homestead out in the prairie, and they've got filaments that connect these, which are like big interstates that connect urban centers. Galaxies move throughout this cosmic web, as we call it, this web of structure over time. And in the early times in the universe, the universe was pretty smooth. But as time went on, gravity started pulling galaxies closer together into this cosmic web structure.”
The goal of it all, Rudnick said, is to really try and understand the universe’s past. The data for this project should be coming in later in 2027
“The universe underwent a big change when it was 500million years old,” Rudnick said. “It went from being composed entirely of atoms to being composed almost entirely of ionized ions, and so we want to understand that. We want to map that and chart it, and part of it is simply that we want to understand how galaxies formed, how galaxies evolved, how the universe evolved, and this was one of those major milestones in the in the universe.”
How a resilient amoeba is helping search for life outside Earth
In water at Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, researchers found an organism able to withstand extreme temperatures.
This organism named Incendiamoeba cascadensis, nicknamed the fire amoeba, can withstand temps of up to 147 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s not the only organism that lives in really hot environments.
Ken Stedman is a professor of biology at Portland State University and one of the directors for the Center for Life in Extreme Environments said Beryl Rappaport, a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at Syracuse University, made the discovery in a peculiar place.
“Where Beryl found these amazing amoeba is something we ignore when we walk past most of the time, because it's for us is a relatively cold environment,” Stedman said. “We're looking for extremophilic bacteria, really, really tiny stuff. But very different from the amoeba again, which are much more like us than the bacteria are.”
Rappaport said they were able to collect the amoeba using barbeque tongs and they put a sampling tube at the end of it to catch some of the water and the sample they needed.
Stedman said this discovery could help scientists and researchers in their search for life on other planets.
“From our point of view, we're not going to find Incendiamoeba cascadensis on Mars or some other planet,” he said. “But we might find an organism that has figured out how to deal with extreme conditions in a similar way to these extreme amoeba. So basically, it's understanding how they can do it, and then being able to say, ‘Okay, well, we know how it works here. Can we figure out something about how it could work there?’”
