Highlights
Short notes on recent papers, written for anyone with an interest in galaxies rather than for specialists. Subscribe by RSS.
142 hours with MUSE reveal a 700-kiloparsec filament of glowing hydrogen linking two quasars at z ≈ 3.22 — the structure cold dark matter has always predicted, imaged in enough detail to measure.
A five-megaparsec stretch of filament at z ≈ 4, threaded through nineteen ordinary galaxies and no quasars at all — which says the glow is set by the gas itself, not by whatever happens to be shining on it.
Matching hundreds of metal absorbers against the galaxies near them, across the MAGG survey, resolves into a three-part picture: a galaxy's own halo, the filaments running between galaxies, and a thin enriched medium far from anything.
Stacking six hundred everyday galaxies from two MUSE surveys reveals magnesium and oxygen glowing well beyond where the stars stop — the first average measurement of metal emission around a normal galaxy population at z ≈ 1.
