Galaxies News

February 27, 2025

Top Headlines

In Ancient Stellar Nurseries, Some Stars Are Born of Fluffy Clouds

Feb. 20, 2025 — Researchers have found that stars in the early universe may have formed from 'fluffy' molecular clouds. Using the ALMA telescope to observe the Small Magellanic Cloud -- whose environment is similar to the early universe -- they observed that about ...

300 New Intermediate-Mass Black Holes Plus 2500 New Active Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies Discovered

Feb. 19, 2025 — Within the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument's early data, scientists have uncovered the largest samples ever of intermediate-mass black holes and dwarf galaxies hosting an active black hole, more ...

Phoenix Galaxy Cluster in the Act of Extreme Cooling

Feb. 13, 2025 — New findings explain the Phoenix cluster's mysterious starburst. Data confirm the cluster is actively cooling and able to generate a huge amount of stellar fuel on its ...

Euclid Discovers a Stunning Einstein Ring

Feb. 10, 2025 — Euclid, the European Space Agency's dark Universe detective, has made an astonishing discovery -- right in our cosmic ...

Latest Headlines

updated 8:32am EST

Straight Shot: Hubble Investigates Galaxy With Nine Rings

Feb. 4, 2025 — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a cosmic bullseye! The gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1313424 is rippling with nine star-filled rings after an 'arrow' -- a far smaller blue dwarf galaxy -- shot ...

The Hidden Power of the Smallest Microquasars

Jan. 29, 2025 — Researchers found for the first time evidence that even microquasars containing a low-mass star are efficient particle accelerators, which leads to a significant impact on the interpretation of the ...

Astronomers Thought They Understood Fast Radio Bursts: A Recent One Calls That Into Question

Jan. 21, 2025 — Fast radio bursts are mysterious and brief flashes of radio emissions that were thought to be produced by magnetars, highly magnetized rotating ...

First Fast Radio Burst Traced to Old, Dead, Elliptical Galaxy

Jan. 21, 2025 — Astronomers previously thought all FRBs were generated by magnetars formed through the explosions of very young, massive stars. But new FRB is pinpointed to the outskirts of 11.3-billion-year-old ...

NASA's Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy

Jan. 17, 2025 — In the years following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby ...

Large and Small Galaxies May Grow in Ways More Similar Than Expected

Jan. 16, 2025 — Galaxies like the Milky Way grow by merging with smaller galaxies over billions of years, unlike dwarf galaxies, which have long been thought to lack the heft to attract mass and grow in the same ...

This Tiny Galaxy Is Answering Some Big Questions

Jan. 16, 2025 — Leo P, a small galaxy and a distant neighbor of the Milky Way, is lighting the way for astronomers to better understand star formation and how a galaxy grows. Scientists have reported finding that ...

Three Tiny 'Stellar-Ghost-Town' Galaxies Discovered

Jan. 15, 2025 — By combining data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys and the Gemini South telescope, astronomers have investigated three ultra-faint dwarf galaxies that reside in a region of space isolated from ...

NASA Celebrates Edwin Hubble's Discovery of a New Universe

Jan. 15, 2025 — For humans, the most important star in the universe is our Sun. The second-most important star is nestled inside the Andromeda galaxy. Don't go looking for it -- the flickering star is 2.2 million ...

Hubble Reveals Surprising Spiral Shape of Galaxy Hosting Young Jet

Jan. 13, 2025 — The night sky has always played a crucial role in navigation, from early ocean crossings to modern GPS. Besides stars, the United States Navy uses quasars as beacons. Quasars are distant galaxies ...

Beyond the 'Dragon Arc', a Treasure Trove of Unseen Stars

Jan. 6, 2025 — Taking advantage of a cosmic 'double lens,' astronomers resolved more than 40 individual stars in a galaxy so far away its light dates back to when the universe was only half its present ...

Physicists Explain a Stellar Stream's Distinctive Features

Jan. 6, 2025 — Physicists have proposed a solution to a long-standing puzzle surrounding the GD-1 stellar stream, one of the most well-studied streams within the galactic halo of the Milky ...

The Carbon in Our Bodies Probably Left the Galaxy and Came Back on Cosmic 'Conveyer Belt'

Jan. 3, 2025 — Scientists recently discovered that the giant 'conveyer belt' currents that push star-forged material out of our galaxy and pull it back in can also transport carbon atoms. That means that ...

Clever Trick to Cook Stars Like Christmas Pudding Detected for First Time

Dec. 20, 2024 — Researchers have found evidence of magnetic fields associated with a disc of gas and dust a few hundred light-years across deep inside a system of two merging galaxies known as Arp220. They say these ...

Supermassive Black Holes Halt Rapid Construction in an Ancient Celestial City

Dec. 18, 2024 — Galaxy clusters -- the big cities of the universe -- are home to many giant elliptical galaxies that have completed their growth and are not forming stars. However, it is still unclear what has shut ...

Binary Star Found Near Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole

Dec. 17, 2024 — An international team of researchers has detected a binary star orbiting close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It is the first time a stellar pair has been ...

Astrophysicists Capture Astonishing Images of Gamma-Ray Flare from Supermassive Black Hole M87

Dec. 13, 2024 — The galaxy M87, located in the Virgo constellation, provided the first-ever photo of a black hole in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the ...

A New Galaxy, Much Like Our Own

Dec. 11, 2024 — Stunning new photographs by a team of astronomers have revealed a newly forming galaxy that looks remarkably similar to a young Milky Way. The extraordinary images give us an unprecedented picture of ...

Black Hole Debate Settled? Stellar-Mass Black Holes Found at the Heart of the Milky Way's Largest Star Cluster

Dec. 9, 2024 — Could a decades-long debate about the mysterious movements of stars in Omega Centauri, the largest star cluster in the Milky Way, finally be ...

Astronomers Witness the in Situ Spheroid Formation in Distant Submillimetre-Bright Galaxies

Dec. 5, 2024 — Researchers have used the ALMA telescope and found old elliptical galaxies in the universe can form from intense star formation within early galaxy ...

Astronomers Close to Solving Mystery of How Universe's Giant Galaxies Formed

Dec. 4, 2024 — Astrophysicists find the birth sites of gigantic elliptical galaxies which they say gives new clues about how they were formed. The galaxies look like bulging footballs and how they were created ...

Team Unlocks New Insights on Pulsar Signals

Nov. 26, 2024 — Results showed that in almost all cases, measured bandwidths were higher than predictions by widely used models of the galaxy, highlighting a need for updates to current ISM density ...

Novel Supernova Observations Grant Astronomers a Peek Into the Cosmic Past

Nov. 25, 2024 — An international team of researchers has made new observations of an unusual supernova, finding the most metal-poor stellar explosion ever ...

3.2 Million Km/h Galaxy Smash-Up

Nov. 22, 2024 — A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one travelling at a scarcely-believable 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth's most powerful ...

Astronomers Take the First Close-Up Picture of a Star Outside Our Galaxy

Nov. 21, 2024 — While astronomers have taken about two dozen zoomed-in images of stars in our galaxy, unveiling their properties, countless other stars dwell within other galaxies, so far away that observing even ...

Three Galactic 'Red Monsters' in the Early Universe

Nov. 13, 2024 — Astronomers have identified three ultra-massive galaxies -- nearly as massive as the Milky Way -- already in place within the first billion years after the Big Bang. This surprising discovery was ...

Astronomers' Theory of How Galaxies Formed May Be Upended

Nov. 12, 2024 — The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming ...

Astrophysicists Use Echoes of Light to Illuminate Black Holes

Nov. 7, 2024 — Researchers have developed an innovative technique to search for black hole light echoes. Their novel method, which will make it easier for the mass and the spin of black holes to be measured, ...

Mighty Radio Bursts Linked to Massive Galaxies

Nov. 6, 2024 — Researchers have uncovered where FRBs are more likely to occur in the universe -- massive star-forming galaxies rather than low - mass ...

New ESO Image Captures a Dark Wolf in the Sky

Oct. 31, 2024 — For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals a spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly ...