Stars are born from huge clouds of mostly hydrogen gas floating in space. Astronomers like me study this gas because it helps us understand how stars and galaxies form and grow. Hydrogen gas gives off a faint glow that is invisible to human eyes but can be observed with a telescope tuned to detect radio ...
Supermassive black holes reside in some of the biggest galaxies in the universe, and many emit radio waves. They tend to be billions of times more massive that our Sun, and not even light itself can escape a black hole once it gets too close. But it’s not all darkness. Supermassive black holes power some ...
In the grand tapestry of the cosmos, there exists a celestial wonder that has captured the imagination of humanity for eons — the Milky Way. Spanning vast stretches of the night sky, this cosmic masterpiece is more than just a distant spiral of stars. The Milky Way is humanity’s heavenly home, a beacon of mystery ...
“Look at this,” says Erica’s message. She is poring over the very first images from the brand-new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of galaxies in the distant universe. It is July 2022, barely a week after those first images from the revolutionary super telescope were released. Twenty-five years in the making, a hundred to a ...
An international team of astronomers has used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date. The light from these galaxies has taken more than 13.4 billion years to reach us, as these galaxies date back to less than 400 million years after the Big Bang ...
While observing a newly-dormant galaxy using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), scientists discovered that it had stopped forming stars not because it had used up all of its gas, but because most of its star-forming fuel had been thrown out of the system as it merged with another galaxy. The ...
It’s been nearly a century since astronomer Fritz Zwicky first calculated the mass of the Coma Cluster, a dense galaxy cluster of almost 1,000 galaxies located in the nearby universe. But estimating the mass of something so huge and dense, not to mention 320 million light-years away, has its share of problems — then and ...
Scientists who study the cosmos have a favorite philosophy known as the “mediocrity principle,” which, in essence, suggests that there’s really nothing special about Earth, the Sun, or the Milky Way galaxy compared to the rest of the universe. Now, new research from CU Boulder adds yet another piece of evidence to the case for ...
In a new Nature Astronomy study, an international team led by astrophysicists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College report how, when tiny galaxies collide with bigger ones, the bigger galaxies can strip the smaller galaxies of their dark matter — matter that we can’t see directly, but that astrophysicists think must exist because, without ...
Using the most advanced telescopes on Earth and in orbit, scientists like Dr. Rebecca McElroy have gained unprecedented access to nearby galaxies, investigating how clouds of cold gas coalesce into hot balls of nuclear fusion giving birth to stars and stunning galactic fireworks. Breathtaking images of galaxies close to the Milky Way have been released ...
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