An amateur astronomer from Italy has discovered five new dwarf galaxies around a distant spiral galaxy — a spiral that’s one of the largest galaxies in the sky over Earth. His name is Giuseppe Donatiello, and those five dwarf galaxies are now named Donatiello V, Donatiello VI, Donatiello VII, Donatiello VIII, and Donatiello IX (Do V, […]
And you thought rush hour was hell on Earth! New research suggests some “cosmic intersections” have failed “traffic lights” that deem black hole collisions almost inevitable. At the hearts of all large galaxies lie cosmic monsters called supermassive black holes, enormous voids that swirl around everything in the galaxies themselves. This swirly behavior influences things […]
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that early universe galaxies must have grown up way faster than expected. Plus, the same team also found that, 10 billion years ago, the cosmos wasn’t quite as disordered and chaotic as previously believed. The international team, led by researchers from Durham University in the U.K., […]
The more evolved a galaxy is, the more collectively chaotic the orbits of its many stars are, new research shows, answering a key detail about how galaxies age. Our sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy once every 225 million years, at a velocity averaging 514,495 mph (828,000 kph). Astronomers call this a […]
Astronomers have been surprised by a “gold rush” of new galaxies, racking up 49 discoveries in just 3 hours. The gas-rich galaxies were uncovered by a team using the MeerKAT radio telescope located in South Africa. They have been dubbed the “forty-niners,” a callback to the nickname given to the thousands of gold miners who […]
Citizen scientists and artificial intelligence have come together to discover a staggering 430,000 galaxies scattered across the universe. The massive haul includes 30,000 ring galaxies, which are considered to be the rarest of all possible galaxy shapes. The discoveries represent the first results from the “GALAXY CRUISE” citizen science project. They were delivered by 10,000 […]
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and an effect predicted by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago to discover that small galaxies in the early cosmos packed a massive punch, shaping the entire universe when it was less than 1 billion years old. The international team found the galaxies, which resemble dwarf […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has stepped on the tails of 12 interacting galaxies and found them to be studded with the shining diamonds of young star clusters —scientists compare the phenomena to cosmic “strings of pearls.” When spiral galaxies interact, either through direct collision or close encounter, their spiral arms unravel. The gravitational force that […]
“What came first, the galaxy or its monster black hole?” Technically, it’s an even more ancient riddle than the one about the chicken or the egg — though we’ve only relatively recently become aware of it. And, according to new research, scientists may finally have an answer. Supermassive black holes that existed close to the […]
If the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) investigates tiny and bright galaxies in the early universe, it may be able to to shine a light on dark matter — the universe’s most mysterious stuff. Such is the conclusion reached by scientists from the University of California, who ran a simulation of the cosmos that tracks […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has zoomed in on one side of a cosmic tug-of-war that will rage between two galaxies for tens of millions of years. Frustratingly, this is one competition in which a clear winner may never emerge, as the two galaxies could well be drawn together to merge into one at the end […]
Just like being trapped within a spider’s web drastically changes a fly’s life, galaxies ensnared in the vast cosmic web are dramatically and irreversibly altered. Now, scientists from the University of Kansas are aiming to better understand the mechanisms at play in shaping clusters of galaxies as they travel through a cosmic web of different […]