Latest news with #UniversidadDeChile
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers capture the most intricate picture of a galaxy in a thousand colors ever seen (photo, video)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have obtained a stunning new image of the Sculptor Galaxy, painted in thousands of colors that reveals the intricacies of galactic systems. The incredible image of the galaxy — located around 11 million light-years away and also known as NGC 253 — was collected with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. In addition to providing a galaxy-wide view of the Sculptor Galaxy, the image shows intricate details of NGC 253. As such, it could help to reveal the finer details of the poorly understood and complex systems that are galaxies. "The Sculptor Galaxy is in a sweet spot," team leader Enrico Congiu of the Universidad de Chile said in a statement." It is close enough that we can resolve its internal structure and study its building blocks with incredible detail, but at the same time, big enough that we can still see it as a whole system." Covering 65,000 light-years of the 90,000-light-year-wide galaxy, zooming in on the finer details of the Sculptor Galaxy to create this image required 100 exposures collected over 50 hours of MUSE observing time. That effort was justified by the unprecedented detail revealed in the Sculptor Galaxy VLT image. "We can zoom in to study individual regions where stars form at nearly the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom out to study the galaxy as a whole," said team member Kathryn Kreckel, from Heidelberg University in Germany. An initial examination of the image has already paid dividends for the team. Within the image, they have been able to discover 500 new planetary nebulae, shells of gas and dust that are ejected from stars like the sun after they "die" and enter a "puffed out" red giant phase. This is pretty extraordinary, because detections like this beyond the Milky Way and its immediate neighbors are fairly rare. "Beyond our galactic neighborhood, we usually deal with fewer than 100 detections per galaxy," said team member and Heidelberg University researcher Fabian Scheuermann. Related Stories: — Very Large Telescope: Everything you need to know — What is a galaxy? — The greatest astronomical discoveries of the past 25 years The planetary nebulae — which, despite the name, have nothing to do with planets — could bear fruit in the future, as they can be used by astronomers to make distance measurements. "Finding the planetary nebulae allows us to verify the distance to the galaxy — a critical piece of information on which the rest of the studies of the galaxy depend," explained team member and Ohio State University researcher Adam Leroy. That's not to say that the team is finished with this image of the Sculptor Galaxy just yet. The next step for the astronomers will be to explore how hot gas flows through NGC 253, changing composition and helping to create new stars. "How such small processes can have such a big impact on a galaxy whose entire size is thousands of times bigger is still a mystery," Congiu concluded. The team's research was published online today (June 18) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Latin American countries to launch own AI model in September
By Fabian Cambero SANTIAGO (Reuters) -A dozen Latin American countries are collaborating to launch Latam-GPT in September, the first large artificial intelligence language model trained to understand the region's diverse cultures and linguistic nuances, Chilean officials said on Tuesday. This open-source project, steered by Chile's state-run National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) alongside over 30 regional institutions, seeks to significantly increase the uptake and accessibility of AI across Latin America. Chilean Science Minister Aisen Etcheverry said the project "could be a democratizing element for AI," envisioning its application in schools and hospitals with a model that reflects the local culture and language. Developed starting in January 2023, Latam-GPT seeks to overcome inaccuracies and performance limitations of global AI models predominantly trained on English. Officials said that it was meant to be the core technology for developing applications like chatbots, not a direct competitor to consumer products like ChatGPT. A key goal is preserving Indigenous languages, with an initial translator already developed for Rapa Nui, Easter Island's native language. The project plans to extend this to other Indigenous languages for applications like virtual public service assistants and personalized education systems. The model is based on Llama 3 AI technology and is trained using a regional network of computers, including facilities at Chile's University of Tarapaca and cloud-based systems. Regional development bank CAF and Amazon Web Services have supported it. While currently lacking a dedicated budget, CENIA head Alvaro Soto hopes that demonstrating the system's capabilities will attract more funding. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
