MAUNA KEA, HAWAII – UC Santa Cruz astronomers who used the W. M. Keck Observatory to capture the first image of a filament of the "cosmic web" have been recognized by the editors of Physics World for one of the "Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2014".
The team, led by UC Santa Cruz
astronomers Sebastiano Cantalupo (now at ETH Zurich), J. Xavier Prochaska, and
Piero Madau, detected the glowing gas of the filament due to its illumination by
the intense radiation given off by a distant quasar. Using Keck Observatory’s Keck
I telescope in Hawaii, they observed a very large, luminous nebula of gas
extending about 2 million light-years across intergalactic space, which they
nicknamed the 'Slug Nebula' in honor of UCSC's banana slug mascot.
This is the second time that
Prochaska's research group has been recognized by Physics World for a top ten breakthrough. In 2011, his team's
discovery of pristine clouds of gas formed shortly after the Big Bang was also
featured as one of nine runners-up to the "Breakthrough of the Year"
in Science magazine in addition to
making the Physics World top ten.
"It may never happen
again, so I'm especially amazed to get this acknowledgement a second
time," said Prochaska, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC.
"This
award is also for Keck Observatory and for all the people that work
there," said Cantalupo. "Without their wonderful support, this discovery
would have not be possible. Many people helped me install and use the
filter that enabled this discovery, including Luca Rizzi, Marc Kassis,
Dwight Chan, Gary Anderson, Greg Wirth and others."
Prochaska noted that a new
instrument is being built for Keck Observatory that will greatly facilitate
future research on the cosmic web. The Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) will be
able to perform "spectral imaging," capturing both an image and a
spectrum of an object simultaneously. Keck Observatory is currently working with
the UC Observatories instrument labs at UC Santa Cruz to develop the camera for KCWI.
Physics World is an international monthly magazine published by
the Institute of Physics. In addition to Cantalupo, Prochaska, and Madau, the
coauthors of the cosmic web paper included Fabrizio Arrigoni-Battaia and Joseph
Hennawi of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. For more
information about the cosmic web discovery, see "Distant quasar illuminates a filament of the cosmic web."
Source: W.M. Keck Observatory
