An international team of astronomers has completed the most comprehensive ultraviolet survey of the local universe to date, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope. The survey could help scientists better understand how stars come to form, and how galaxies like our own evolve over time.
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Elements like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen weren’t very common until the first stars had fired up, burnt out and exploded. Now, astronomers using ALMA have detected the most distant – and hence, earliest – signature of oxygen, in a galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away.
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ESA has taken a “galactic census” of the Milky Way, unveiling the second major data release from the Gaia mission. The data release provides the most detailed map of our home galaxy, which includes data of nearly 1.7 billion stars, plus the orbits and positions of thousands of asteroids.
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Astronomers have discovered two enormous clusters of ancient galaxies that existed when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old. By observing these protoclusters, astronomers can better understand the nature of the early universe, and how it may have evolved into its current state.
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With the James Webb Space Telescope promising to capture pictures of universe with a degree of detail never before seen, we take a look back at some of the most breathtaking intergalactic images humanity has snapped.
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Now there’s a new wrinkle to the story of dark matter, as scientists at Yale University have for the first time discovered a galaxy that appears to have no dark matter at all. Ironically, the find may just turn out to be the exception that proves the rule.
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NASA has added a further 12 images to its already stunning Hubble gallery of Messier deep-sky objects. The updated collection highlights the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, and its ability to provide spectacularly detailed, views of remote cosmic objects.
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According to a newly published paper, the distant halo of stars that orbits the Milky Way could include parts of our own galaxy that were forcefully ejected following a dramatic collision or close pass with a smaller dwarf galaxy.
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Black holes can be anywhere from a few times the mass of the Sun up to millions of times that, but some even bigger than that. A new study of data gathered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope has found these so-called “ultramassive” black holes may be larger and more common than we thought.
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The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunningly detailed view of the weakly barred spiral galaxy NGC 3344, which is located some 20 million light-years away in the direction of the "Lion Cub" constellation, Leo Minor.
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