Astrophysicists are using oxygen to learn more about galaxies far, far away. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Cen…
By Harvard University · AI
Astrophysicists are using oxygen to learn more about galaxies far, far away. Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics developed a new method of "chemical archaeology" to reconstruct the formation of distant galaxies over billions of years. In the new technique, light from the galaxy is captured by a telescope and then is split into colors. The optical wavelengths provide indicators of gases at each location. The team applied this method to NGC 1365, a massive spiral…