All posts tagged: Alma

Shadow Blaster points to starburst galaxies as hidden sources of cosmic neutrinos

Shadow Blaster points to starburst galaxies as hidden sources of cosmic neutrinos

Published by Jenni Sidey

A ghostlike particle from deep space sent astronomers chasing one of the Universe’s hardest mysteries. The trail led somewhere unexpected. Instead of a ravenous black hole, the signal appears linked to a distant galaxy packed with fast, furious star formation. The particle was a high-energy neutrino, detected on Sept. 22, 2021, by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Known as IC 210922A, the event carried an energy of about 750 teraelectronvolts. It ranked among IceCube’s most notable alerts that year. Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to trace. They rarely interact with matter, which makes them useful cosmic messengers but frustrating ones. Although a few galaxies have already been tied to neutrino production, those known sources still do not explain the full background of high-energy neutrinos arriving at Earth. When an international team followed up on IC 210922A with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, and other observatories, they found an unusually bright galaxy about 11 billion light-years away. Consequently, it became the prime suspect. This image shows the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed “Shadow …

Astronomers detect first direct evidence of star-forming gas in early galaxies

Astronomers detect first direct evidence of star-forming gas in early galaxies

Published by Jenni Sidey

The first galaxies were already busy by the time the universe was 700 to 800 million years old. Stars were forming fast. Structures were taking shape. Additionally, huge stores of gas were feeding that growth. What astronomers have struggled to see clearly is the neutral gas at the center of that process. It is the cooler material that directly supplies star formation. That missing piece has now come into view. An international team led by Assistant Professor Yoshinobu Fudamoto and Professor Masamune Oguri of Chiba University used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, to detect the [O I] 145 micrometer emission line in four distant galaxies. The signal comes from neutral oxygen and serves as a direct tracer of neutral gas. As a result, it is a powerful way to study the material that fuels early star formation. The galaxies were seen as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, at redshifts above 6.5. According to the team, this is the most distant direct detection yet of neutral gas in typical star-forming galaxies. …

Galaxy-killing wind may explain why giant galaxies died so early

Galaxy-killing wind may explain why giant galaxies died so early

Published by Jenni Sidey

A massive galaxy in the early universe seems to be growing itself toward ruin. While it churns out new stars at a furious pace, it is also blasting away the cold gas that makes those stars possible. This is a self-defeating process that may help explain why so many big galaxies died young. The system, called CRISTAL-02, appears just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. This is a time when astronomers did not expect to find large numbers of massive, quiescent galaxies. Those are galaxies that had already stopped forming stars. Yet the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed many of them. Their existence has become one of the biggest puzzles in modern astrophysics. Now a team led by Dr Rebecca Davies of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne says CRISTAL-02 offers a simpler answer than some of the more exotic ideas proposed in recent years. Rather than needing changes to dark energy or some other revision to cosmic history, the evidence points to a violent but familiar process. In this process galaxies collide, …

Alma Allen Accuses David Resnicow of Undermining His 2026 US Pavilion

Alma Allen Accuses David Resnicow of Undermining His 2026 US Pavilion

Published by Jenni Sidey

Artist Alma Allen has again accused art publicist David Resnicow of working against Allen’s controversial U.S. Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, after months of criticism surrounding the project. In an Instagram post published Monday afternoon, Allen wrote that “two of the three galleries that withdrew their support for my pavilion informed me that they did so on the advice of David Resnicow,” referring to the veteran art-world publicist whose firm has represented the US Pavilion six times before this year’s edition. Related Articles “I have never met Mr. Resnicow,” Allen wrote in the post “But his name came up frequently from individuals who told me he had warned them not to support this year’s American Pavilion. This included arts writers, museum directors, funders, curators, and two of the three galleries that withdrew support.” Allen’s post marks the second time he has publicly identified Resnicow by name. The first was in a New York Times article in March announcing that Allen had gained representation with the international gallery Perrotin after Kasmin and Mendes Wood DM, both of which …

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Milky Way’s central black hole has long posed an awkward problem. By every standard picture of how black holes behave, Sagittarius A* should be blowing material back into space as it feeds. Yet for more than half a century, astronomers could not find clear evidence that it was doing so. Now they say that missing wind has finally turned up. A team at Northwestern University used years of observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile to build an unusually sharp map of the cold gas crowding the black hole’s neighborhood. In that map, they found a broad, cone-shaped cavity carved out of molecular gas within about one parsec, or roughly three light-years, of Sagittarius A*. The researchers argue that only a hot wind from the black hole can explain the feature. Therefore, this offers what they describe as the clearest evidence yet that the Milky Way’s central black hole is not an exception to the usual rules. The highest-resolution and most sensitive map of cold gas within ∼1 pc from …

Astronomers can now measure newborn planet mass from dusty stellar rings

Astronomers can now measure newborn planet mass from dusty stellar rings

Published by Jenni Sidey

A bright ring of dust circling a young star can look calm from far away. In reality, it may mark one of the messiest moments in planetary birth, where gas, pebbles, and gravity are still fighting over what kind of solar system will emerge. These disks, the swirling bands of gas and dust around young stars, are where planets form. Modern observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, have revealed that many of them contain sharply defined rings and gaps. Astronomers have long suspected that some of those structures are the work of hidden planets, but turning those patterns into reliable planet measurements has remained difficult. “These bright rings are not just beautiful structures – they are essentially planetary fingerprints,” said lead author Amena Faruqi, a PhD student in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the University of Warwick. Simulation of a planet embedded in a protoplanetary disc, causing disc material to pile up in a ring exterior to its orbit. (CREDIT: Amena Faruqi / University of Warwick) “We’ve long understood that …

Alma Allen’s US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale Falls Flat

Alma Allen’s US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale Falls Flat

Published by José Betancourt

The United States is in a sad state of affairs. That wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who reads or watches the news, or even just scrolls social media and skims the headlines. But you would also know it if you happened to walk by the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, where the American representative this year, Alma Allen, has installed five extremely unremarkable sculptures in front of the building, along with some 20 works inside. It’s a sharp turn from how the US Pavilion has looked the last couple of times around. The previous two artists to take over the pavilion, Simone Leigh (2022) and Jeffrey Gibson (2024), sought to radically transform the Palladian structure in the center of the Giardini, built in 1930. Despite their drastically different approaches, both artists sought to surface the history of colonialism and empire at the core of the United States’ founding and present. Related Articles That isn’t the case in 2026. As the US and international press have reported ad nauseam, the second Trump …

3I/ATLAS had a far colder birthplace than our Solar System

3I/ATLAS had a far colder birthplace than our Solar System

Published by Jenni Sidey

Long before 3I/ATLAS slipped through the inner solar system, its water had already recorded the kind of place it came from. That record now looks extreme. Astronomers studying the interstellar comet say its water contains an unusually heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium at levels far beyond anything measured in comets closer to home. The signal is so strong that it points to a birthplace far colder than the environment that formed Earth, the planets, and the icy bodies that still orbit the Sun. The result offers one of the sharpest chemical glimpses yet into how different other planetary systems may be from our own. “Our new observations show that the conditions that led to the formation of our solar system are much different from how planetary systems evolved in different parts of our galaxy,” said Luis Salazar Manzano, lead author of the research and a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy. Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS carries deuterium-rich water, pointing to a far colder birthplace than our solar system. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / …

How Will the Venice Biennale Impact Alma Allen’s Market?

How Will the Venice Biennale Impact Alma Allen’s Market?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Controversy has swirled around the artist Alma Allen since he was announced as America’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens to art professionals and press next week. The conversation has tended to highlight the compromised selection process under President Trump, with much of the scrutiny centered around the fact that a museum didn’t commission the pavilion, as is common. Instead, the commissioner this time is a newly created body called the American Arts Conservancy headed by Jenni Parido, who up until 2024 ran a boutique pet food lifestyle shop in Tampa, Florida, and entered Trump’s orbit though pet charity events held at Mar-a-Lago. After the announcement, Allen’s galleries, Olney Gleason and Mendes Wood DM dropped him, but a new, just as high-profile one, Perrotin, picked him up. Related Articles The question now is, what will the effect of the Biennale—and all its attendant drama—be on Allen’s market? “I love Alma,” Beth Rudin DeWoody, a longtime supporter, said. “I collect his work and I’m not at all happy with his controversy. I think art should just transcend all of that… [Venice] is a great opportunity for him. It’s a shame his galleries dropped …

Alma Allen U.S. Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 Selection Process Controversy

Alma Allen U.S. Pavilion Venice Biennale 2026 Selection Process Controversy

Published by José Betancourt

Alma Allen‘s pavilion for the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale has become a proxy fight over politics, process, and cultural authority—questions the artist himself has little interest in adjudicating. “I don’t think my work is political in respect to party politics,” Allen said as he prepared his exhibition, adding that his more immediate concern was practical: “some of the pieces barely fit in the doorway.”  A report by the New York Times has drawn fresh attention to how the US Pavilion came together, after the State Department abandoned its long-standing selection model and handed control to a newly formed nonprofit with virtually no track record of mounting exhibitions.  Related Articles For decades, the US Pavilion followed a familiar script: museums would submit proposals to a panel of experts formed by the National Endowment of the Arts, with the panel having final say over the which proposal would win. This year, that system was scrapped. The State Department instead turned to the American Arts Conservancy, led by Jenni Parido, a Florida-based founder without museum experience, working with independent curator Jeffrey …