A galaxy can come in many shapes and sizes, from giant, slowly rotating ovals and fast-whirling spiral disks to faint ball-shaped blobs and dwarf irregulars. Most large, bright galaxies — including our own Milky Way — are orbited by a gang of much smaller dwarf galaxies. Most of this we know from optical images, whether ...
Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a hazy band of stars stretching from horizon to horizon. For the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos — tiny, ghost-like astronomical messengers. In research ...
A team of astronomers in Japan has discovered for the first time a faint radio emission covering a giant galaxy with an energetic black hole at its center — quasar 3C 273. The radio emission is released from gas that is created directly by the central black hole. The result was obtained through high dynamic ...
Analysis of unique “fingerprints” in light emitted from material surrounding young stars has revealed “significant reservoirs” of large organic molecules necessary to form the basis of life. Dr. John Ilee, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds who led the study, says the findings suggest that the basic chemical conditions that resulted in life on Earth could ...
The center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is framed by the tell-tale arcs that result from strong gravitational lensing, a striking astronomical phenomenon that can warp, magnify, or even duplicate the appearance of distant galaxies. Gravitational lensing Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a distant galaxy is subtly distorted by the ...
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 ...
Submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) are a class of the most luminous, distant, and rapidly star-forming galaxies known and can shine brighter than a trillion Suns (about one hundred times more luminous in total than the Milky Way). They are generally hard to detect in the visible, however, because most of their ultraviolet and optical light is ...
Though our galaxy is an immense city of at least 200 billion stars, the details of how infant stars formed remain largely cloaked in mystery. Scientists know that stars form from the collapse of huge hydrogen clouds that are squeezed under gravity to the point where nuclear fusion ignites. But only about 30 percent of ...
With the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand ...
Computer simulations are showing astrophysicists how massive clumps of gas within galaxies scatter some stars from their orbits, eventually creating the smooth, exponential fade in the brightness of many disk galaxies. Researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and IBM Research have advanced studies they started nearly 10 years ago. They originally focused ...
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