Research Highlight

International team of astronomers discovers giant magnetic ropes in a galaxy's halo

** An image of the "Whale Galaxy" (NGC 4631), made with the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), reveals hair-like filaments of the galaxy's magnetic field protruding above and below the galaxy's disk.

An international team of astronomers, including our graduate student Tim Braun and Professor Richard Rand, discovers giant magnetic ropes in a galaxy’s halo.

See the article from the UNM Newsroom

** Composite image by Jayanne English of the University of Manitoba, with NRAO VLA radio data from Marita Krause and Silvia Carolina Mora-Partiarroyo of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. The observations are part of the project Continuum HAlos in Nearby Galaxies -- an EVLA Survey (CHANG-ES). The optical data were from the Mayall 4-meter telescope, collected by Maria Patterson and Rene Walterbos of New Mexico State University. Arpad Miskolczi of the University of Bochum provided the software code for tracing the magnetic field lines.