Galaxies

If you're fascinated by Nature, these images of spiral galaxies won't help you escape your fascination.These images show incredible detail in 19 spirals, imaged face-on by the JWST. The galactic arms with their multitudes of stars are lit up in infrared light, as are the dense galactic cores, where supermassive black holes reside.The JWST captured these images as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) programme. PHANGS is a long-running program aimed at understanding how gas and star…

The universe is misbehaving.Upon its birth in the big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, the cosmos began expanding. And for most of the 20th century, scientists assumed gravity would gradually slow down that expansion, with all the universe’s matter acting as drag.But observations in the late 1990s showed that’s far from the case. Careful, high-precision estimates of cosmic distances using a special class of exploding stars called type Ia supernovae revealed that, against all expectations, the universe’s expansion is…

In the summer of 2015 Ignacio Trujillo was sifting through deep-sky images when a slice of constellation Cetus (“whale”) caught his attention. Sourced from a telescope in the universe-mapping Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the snapshot had captured an almost indiscernible “something” that was so obscured by noisy pixels that it could have been a banal artifact or an unremarkable fragment of a passing comet’s tail. But Trujillo, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) in Spain, had a scintilla…

Over the years, space agencies and other institutions have been studying the universe for years and years, however, the evolution of galaxies and theories of the Big Bang are some of the things that scientists are still studying to gain a better understanding. For conducting such studies space scientists and researchers have been using powerful telescopes such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. In a recent finding, the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a faint light from an early galaxy which has expanded…

There’s a cosmic “noot,” the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just declared, and it’s both beautiful and adorable.Taking to its official Instagram page, NASA has released two images displaying galaxies that are shaped like a penguin and an egg.Captured by NASA’s Hubble space telescope and Spitzer space telescope, the pairing, known collectively as Arp 142, was found 23 million light-years away, about 10 times farther from us than the Andromeda galaxy.⁣The Andromeda galaxy is a notable barred…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that galaxies in the early universe mainly resemble elongated shapes, such as surfboards and pool noodles, rather than round forms. This finding, based on the analysis of near-infrared images from the CEERS Survey, marks a significant discovery about the structure of early galaxies and extends the insights provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (UT Austin)Hang Ten!…

A team of researchers found a black hole from the early universe, prompting new questions as to how such ancient massive objects might form. The black hole dates to about 400 million years after the Big Bang—the start of the universe as we know it—making the object over 13 billion years old. The universe itself is 13.77 billion years old.Remake this Sci-Fi Film with Peter Capaldi!This black hole is in the galaxy GN-z11, a blotch of light in the distant cosmos. GN-z11 is only about 1% the size of the Milky Way, and the…

A galaxy has been discovered that, unlike any other known in the modern universe, seems to be essentially devoid of stars. The galaxy—a floating hunk of dust and gas aimlessly adrift in space, found only thanks to its subtle, serendipitous signature in a radio telescope—is nearly as massive as the Milky Way yet invisible to the naked eye. The discovery could “upend what we think we know about galaxy formation,” says Pieter van Dokkum, a Yale University astrophysicist, who was not part of the finding.Called J0613+52, the…

January 4, 20243min readAstronomy is beautiful and elegant. The language we use to describe its processes is anything butBy Juan P. Madrid This summer, a team of students and I were enjoying breathtaking views of the night sky while we collected data using telescopes at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. One night, when we were outside on a telescope catwalk between the screams of a mountain lion, one of my students amazed me with her interpretation of the fate of Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our Milky Way. In…

The year 2023, like every other one before it—and, no doubt, every year to come—has had its crests of good news and its troughs of bad tidings. But one constant, reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky over our head. After journeys of mere seconds to billions of years, the light from astronomical objects in the cosmos rains down on all of us, and scientists have patiently photographed some of it to better understand the universe in which we live.And every year we see new things, or old things in new ways, and I’ve…