galaxies

About 200,000 years ago, a massive star in a nearby companion galaxy to the Milky Way exploded. Blasting octillions of tons of debris outwards at high velocity, the explosion has been expanding into space ever since....

When you look up into the sky, all the stars you see are part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And we know our galaxy is just one among many in the universe. It was previously thought that there were trillions of galaxies...

Welcome to the virtual winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting! Astrobites is attending the conference as usual, and we will report highlights from each day here. If you’d like to see more timely updates...

In this series of posts, we sit down with a few of the keynote speakers of the 237th AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here, and read our other...

Astronomers have observed a luminous quasar 13.03 billion light-years from Earth—the most distant quasar discovered to date. Dating back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% its...

Astronomers have discovered about 750,000 quasars, which are among the brightest and most energetic objects in the universe. Despite its uninspiring designation, J0313-1806 is distinct from other quasars. This...

Welcome to the virtual winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting! Astrobites is attending the conference as usual, and we will report highlights from each day here. If you’d like to see more timely updates...

An artist's impression shows galaxy ID2299 losing a tail of gas after being formed in a galactic collision. ESO/M. Kornmesser Astronomers can see a distant galaxy dying as it bleeds cold gas into space. Such gas is...

Around 760 million light years from Earth lies the galaxy cluster Abell 85, a mighty collection of about 500 galaxies all orbiting one another. At its center is the enormous elliptical galaxy Holmberg 15A… and I do...

Around 760 million light years from Earth lies the galaxy cluster Abell 85, a mighty collection of about 500 galaxies all orbiting one another. At its center is the enormous elliptical galaxy Holmberg 15A… and I do...

The Hubble Space Telescope is famous for taking beautiful images of distant galaxies and nebulae, in some of which you can see stars being born. But this birth can be kick-started by destruction, with the formation of...

Title: Evidence for GN-z11 as a luminous galaxy at redshift 10.957Authors: Linhua Jiang, Nobunari Kashikawa, Shu Wang, Gregory Walth, Luis C. Ho, Zheng Cai, Eiichi Egami, Xiaohui Fan, Kei Ito, Yongming...

The mystery surrounding the whereabouts of a supermassive black hole has deepened, researchers say. Despite searching with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that...

When the universe was a fledgling billion years old, a galaxy spewed a ginormous, fast-moving jet of radiation and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, that jet is visible to humans in the form of a...

There is nothing black holes love more than star stuff, but one galaxy is spawning stars faster than the supermassive black hole lurking at its core can eat them. When black holes are feasting on stars, they turn into...

Given that it was expected to last 10 years and considering all the early problems, it’s hard to believe the Hubble Space Telescope made it to 30. What’s more, it continues to be one of the most useful instruments...

One of the more amazing facts about supermassive black holes — gigantic black holes that can have billions of times the Sun's mass and which sit in the centers of big galaxies — is that they can drive some of the...