Clusters

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a captivating image of a galaxy cluster captured by the James Webb Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope is impressing us with its capabilities with each passing day. NASA's $10 billion space telescope has been capturing breathtaking images of far-off galaxies, star clusters, black holes and more. The space telescope was launched on December 25, 2021 and since then it has added many feathers in its cap. One such image was of Galaxy clusters, which are some of the largest…

NGC 346, one of the most dynamic star-forming regions in nearby galaxies, is full of mystery. Now, it is less mysterious with new findings from the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. NGC 346, one of the most dynamic star-forming regions in nearby galaxies, is full of mystery. Now, it is less mysterious with new findings from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. NCG 346 is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy close to our Milky Way. The SMC contains lower concentrations of elements heavier than…

NASA Image of the Day is a stellar snapshot of Mars visible in a sky full of stars. Mars, the Red Planet has fascinated scientists, astronomers as well as science fiction authors for decades due to its mysterious craters, lowlands and a core full of precious and rare metals. Authors have even written books such as War of the Worlds fantasizing about life on Mars. Movies like Total Recall have only fueled the fire of the search for extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet. What's shocking is that the Red Planet can also…

Image of the intracluster light of the cluster SMACS-J0723.3-7327 obtained with the NIRCAM camera on board of Webb. The data have been processed by the IAC team to improve the detection of the faint light between the galaxies (black and white). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScIData obtained by the new <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>James Webb Space Telescope</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The James Webb Space…

Thousands of galaxies flood this near-infrared, high-resolution image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScIA team of astronomers used the James Webb Telescope (JWST) to identify the most distant globular clusters ever discovered. These dense groups of millions of stars may be relics containing the first and oldest stars in the universe.The early analysis of Webb’s First Deep Field image, which depicts some of the universe’s earliest galaxies, was published recently in The Astrophysical Journal…

Go beyond finding clusters in tabular dataPhoto by Alex Shuper on UnsplashWe are also comfortable in finding clusters in rows and columns of data. But how about finding clusters within an image? Let me illustrate the subject using an example of an image from recent world cup football 2022 in Qatar.Shown here is a photo which I had taken during Brazil vs Serbia match. The photo has been taken just before the stunning goal from Richarlison.Photo of world cup football 2022 Brazil vs Serbia taken by myself (image by…

The very first deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just delivered a new treasure from the early Universe.In a splash of light that has traveled for 9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have spotted clusters of stars sparkling around a distant galaxy they have named the Sparkler.These clusters, whatever their nature, are very interesting indeed: could they be younger clumps, bursting with more recent star formation, or older globular clusters that could contain an elusive population of…

How can we determine the equivalent DBSCAN ε parameter for HDBSCAN-generated clusters?The image above depicts the minimum spanning tree of distances in an HDBSCAN-generated cluster. Image by the author made with the Folium package and OpenStreetMap imagery.HDBSCAN is a hierarchical density-based clustering algorithm that works under simple assumptions. At a minimum, it only requires the data points to cluster and the minimum number of observations per cluster. The algorithm accepts a distance matrix if the data has a…

Adding cloud functions before your workflow for a cost-effective solutionDatabricks is a Platform-as-a-Service offering that lets Data Engineers perform ingestion, exploration, and transformation of data. Recently, they included the ability to create data pipelines into their platform with multi-task workflows. In addition, they provide a configurable and scalable data ingestion feature called the Autoloader. With it, you can ingest data both on-demand and in a scheduled fashion. However, if you want to ingest your data…

The colossal shock wave generated by the first stages of a collision between some of the most massive structures in the Universe has just been seen and imaged for the first time.  The detection was found in the galaxy cluster Abell 98, which is a large structure made up of three smaller sub-clusters of galaxies located more than 1.2 billion light-years from the Solar System.There, a huge filament of gas contains the enormous shock along the merger axis that has been theoretically predicted to be the first 'contact'…