Galaxy

Though it seems empty, the intergalactic medium (IGM) actually contains more matter than galaxies do. Now, astronomers have used simulations to reveal new details about the structure of this matter, showing that “intergalactic pancakes” spanning millions of light-years collapse into a cosmic fog.

A galaxy seems like a hard thing to miss – let alone 39 of them – but that’s exactly what a team of astronomers has just discovered. So where have these countless stars been hiding? About 11.5 billion light-years away, in a part of the light spectrum that’s invisible to many telescopes.

Our home galaxy is right on the border of a void so vast it’s hard to picture. To get a better idea of its shape and size, a team of astronomers has mapped out the edges of this extragalactic emptiness, and calculated just how much gravitational influence it has on the Milky Way.

Physicists at Stanford and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have narrowed down the search for dark matter. Using observations of galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the team found that dark matter is likely lighter than previously thought – and interacts even less with normal matter.

Hubble has discovered a structure around a black hole thought to be impossible. A small, “malnourished” black hole has a disk of material circling it – a feature thought unique to supermassive black holes. This disc is also so close to the black hole that it’s distorting and stretching the light.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most intriguing mysteries of modern astronomy, so the more of them we can locate, the closer we get to figuring what causes them. Now astronomers have managed to trace an FRB back to its home galaxy, many billions of light-years away.

Scientists have been unable to figure out what fast radio bursts are or where they’re even coming from. Now, a team of astronomers has finally managed to trace one of the signals back to its home galaxy billions of light-years away, meaning we’re closing in on the culprit.

Last year astronomers discovered a gigantic “ghost” galaxy, named Antlia 2, orbiting the Milky Way. Now, new research led by Rochester University has found that the bizarre galaxy may have been involved in a hit-and-run that left the Milky Way with a wobbly galactic disc.

Dark matter is the mysterious substance that’s believed to permeate the universe, and the discovery last year of a galaxy with no dark matter was quite surprising. But now, astronomers have examined the oddball galaxy a bit closer – and found that it’s not so special after all.

Hubble has been photographing the cosmos for 30 years now, but it still manages to surprise us with some absolutely breathtaking shots. Case in point, the latest image shows the two-faced galaxy NGC 4485, which still bears the stunning scars of a close call with another galaxy millions of years ago.

Scientists have been poring over the Gaia galactic census of Milky Way stars for about a year. Now, a team of researchers has found evidence of a “stellar baby boom,” a short period of time in which more than half the stars in the thin disc were born.

The Hubble Space Telescope has a knack for making us feel incredibly small. The latest image, named the Hubble Legacy Field, is a mosaic of thousands of exposures over the years and constitutes the largest and most comprehensive image ever put together by the Hubble science team.