Tracing the Growth of Galaxies
Like documenting a child’s development in a scrapbook, astronomers use Hubble to capture the appearance of many developing galaxies throughout cosmic time. This is possible because of the mathematical relationship between cosmic distance and time: the deeper Hubble peers into space, the farther back it looks in time. This occurs because light travels at a […]
Astronomers Detect Most Distant Fast Radio Burst to Date
The discovery of the burst, named FRB 20220610A, was made in June last year by the ASKAP radio telescope in Australia and it smashed the team’s previous distance record by 50 percent. “Using ASKAP’s array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where the burst came from,” says Stuart Ryder, an astronomer from Macquarie […]
The Birth of A Very Distant Cluster of Galaxies from the Early Universe
Galaxy clusters, as the name suggests, host a large number of galaxies — sometimes even thousands. They also contain a vast “intracluster medium” (ICM) of gas that permeates the space between the galaxies in the cluster. This gas in fact considerably outweighs the galaxies themselves. Much of the physics of galaxy clusters is well understood; […]
Across the Universe: Hubble Ultra Deep Field
The Hubble (Hubble Space Telescope) Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) peers deeper into the universe than any previous visible-light image. Multiple observations of the same small patch of sky were combined for an equivalent exposure time of more than 11 days. Revealed within the image are thousands of galaxies located many billions of light-years away. Many […]
Video of Galaxy Pair VV 191 (Webb and Hubble Composite Image)
Combining the data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, researchers were able to trace light that was emitted by the large white elliptical galaxy at left through the spiral galaxy at right and identify the effects of interstellar dust in the spiral galaxy. This image of galaxy pair […]
Image the galaxy LEDA 48062 in the constellation Perseus
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy LEDA 48062 in the constellation Perseus. LEDA 48062 is the faint, sparse, amorphous galaxy on the right side of the image, and it is accompanied by a more sharply defined neighbor on the left – the large, disk-like lenticular galaxy UGC 8603. A smattering […]
Spectacular Merger of Three Galaxies Observed
A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy […]
Chandra X-ray Observatory Discovers Giant Black Holes on Collision Course
A new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has tracked two pairs of supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies on collision courses. This is the first evidence for such an impending encounter, providing scientists with important information about the growth of black holes in the early Universe. By definition, dwarf galaxies contain stars with a […]