It seems an amusing coincidence that the world’s most powerful camera, the Fermilab’s Dark Energy Camera, could catch a picture of that little comet Lovejoy.
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The accidental observation took place on December 27 last year when the comet passed in front of the sensitive field of view.
The pictures showed the comet’s nucleus and coma arrayed across several frames.
The comet was 82 million kilometres from Earth. a seemingly long way from us but this camera can operate up to 12.8 billion kilometres.
The Fermilab operators wrote: “Before we can look out beyond our galaxy to the far reaches of the universe, we need to watch out for celestial objects that are much closer to home.”
Perhaps the picture was not so accidental?
In our own galactic neighbourhood the distant Andromeda Galaxy is speeding towards our Milky Way Galaxy home and will collide with us in about two billion years.
Researchers have now postulated that these and other galactic collisions will form huge elliptical galaxies with as well the huge shrouds of dark matter.
These immense galaxies will have a super massive black hole.
“There seems to be a mysterious link between the amount of dark matter a galaxy holds and the size of its central black hole, even though the two operate on vastly different scales,” said lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
Bogdan’s work has been co-authored by Andy Goulding of Princeton University.
The dark matter contained by a galaxy can extend for hundreds of light years beyond the galaxy’s starry edge.
Dark matter therefore has the dominant gravitational impact, controlling galactic evolution and guiding black hole growth.