The data is starting to reveal how galaxies and their black holes evolve.
Astronomers know that mergers play a huge role in galaxy growth. Right now, the Milky Way is slowly consuming the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The evidence is a stream of gas called the Magellanic Stream that's about 600,000 light-years long. The Milky Way (MW) is stripping this gas from the clouds, which don't have enough mass to retain it. They're losing the gravitational tug-of-war with the much more massive MW.
"It sounds like science fiction or the stuff of Hollywood movies."
"His planet's dying, too. We're here for the same reason."
"We really needed the sensitivity of JWST. We also needed the 100 times magnification from gravitational lensing from a galaxy cluster between us and LAP1-B."
A supernova is a powerful and luminous stellar explosion. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The explosion marks the ultimate demise of the star and briefly outshines an entire galaxy, radiating as much energy as the Sun is expected to emit over its entire lifespan.
Regular stars collapse and die once they run out of fuel for their nuclear reactions, but the white dwarfs just sit there, hanging out, for eternity.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral, reflected in the waters of the Kennedy Space Center Turnbasin. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX launched of a batch of Starlink satellites on Tuesday, its first early-evening flight since the FAA lifted restrictions on commercial launches prompted by the government shutdown.
"Throwing a close companion into the mix could possibly wreak further havoc on the already complicated processes surrounding these stars."
NASA budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump will cause a significant funding shortfall to Europe's space science missions. But the European Space Agency hopes it can save them.
Watch an Oort Cloud comet disintegrate before your eyes. Meanwhile, interstellar intruder 3I/ATLAS is brighter than expected.
Dive into the dazzling depths of the universe with this galaxy-themed trivia quiz that spans cosmic facts, mysterious phenomena, and the wild wonders of deep space.
These are the Lego sets you're looking for — The UCS Lego Star Wars sets, the best of the best, ranked in a definitive round-up.
This image shows Euclid's capability to explore both our cosmic neighborhood and the deep universe beyond.
All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Han from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.
Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, may not be the best recipe to describe black holes.
The big reveal will come Wednesday (Nov. 19) at 3 p.m. ET.
Ministerial Council 2025
The European Space Agency’s HydroGNSS, a twin-satellite mission to gather data on Earth’s water cycle, is scheduled to launch on 19 November at 19:18 CET (10:18 Pacific Time). Live coverage of the launch will be shown on ESA Web TV.
Let’s rewind the clock back…oh, I don’t know, let’s say a hundred years. It was 1917, and Einstein had just developed his general theory of relativity. It was a masterpiece, giving us our modern day view of the gravitational force. And like anybody curious about gravity, Einstein decided to apply his new equations to the evolution of the universe.
"Even though it's the first time we've seen a galaxy like this, we think that there could be many more out there."
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