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Four newly discovered galaxies are so dim, so dusty, so impossibly distant that even the Hubble telescope couldn't spot them. But that's not all: these galaxies are so insanely red that astronomers are declaring them a new "species" of galaxy. More »
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Poor Fox News. They posted an article with a headline saying that a New Zealand man was the first amateur astronomer to capture a photograph of another galaxy — when in fact, Rolf Olsen had just captured an image of another solar system, Beta Pictoris. It's an easy mistake to make — galaxies and solar systems both have stars and planets in them, after all. More »
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Check out this totally breathtaking image of Jupiter and two of its moons, Io and Ganymede — it's not just an astounding image, it's also officially the coolest astronomy photo of 2011, according to the Royal Observatory's annual contest. More »
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This awesome map shows the universe around us in the grandest scale possible, with each tiny dot representing a different galaxy. Thanks to this cosmic atlas, you'll never again mix up the Corona Borealis Supercluster with the Large Magellanic Cloud. More »
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We only have five billion years left until the Milky Way galaxy crashes into Andromeda, our nearest neighbor. What will happen to us then? Because galactic collisions take place over millions or billions of years, the process isn't well understood. More »
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Scientists have noticed that the bigger explosions out come from the smaller galaxies. If star size were purely random, bigger galaxies with more stars would have larger explosions. Find out why small galaxies produce massive booms. More »
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The M33 galaxy is a rare galaxy that's "face on" to us, so we can study its make-up. And it's also blue-shifted, meaning it's coming towards us. But it'll collide with Andromeda before it reaches us. More »
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Check out this brilliant image of spiral galaxy NGC 2841, from the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. This galaxy has an unusually low rate of star creation — you can tell by the absence of the pinkish glow of emission nebulae, which would indicate new star birth. What's going on? NASA explains: More »
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Four hundred and thirty million light-years from earth a ring of black holes is forming, possibly around some very nervous aliens. In the constellation Cetus lies ARP 147, the remains of a spiral galaxy and an elliptical galaxy that . . . interacted. More »
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Here's the deepest, most detailed look at the iconic edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891. This first photograph from R. Jay GaBany's new California observatory involved almost 35 hours of exposure time. More »
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The Whirlpool Galaxy looks beautiful and swirling in a visible light image (at left.) But the infrared view, at right, shows a maelstrom of chaos, revealing the dense lanes of dust around normally invisible clusters of stars. More »
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The most massive 3D map of the night sky has been released. It contains a trillion pixels and would require 500,000 high-definition TVs to view in its entirety. These images represent just the tiniest fraction of the full map. More »
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Every now and again, you'll read a science story claiming the "best picture of dark matter" ever. If it's so dark, how can you see it? In this week's "Ask a Physicist", we'll find out. More »
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Check out that extra-bright galaxy towards the top of this image. That's an elliptical galaxy, which are among the largest galaxies in the universe. And now scientists believe these galaxies hold five to ten times more stars than previously thought. More »
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A recent study shows that the intense bar of light you see here, joining the arms of this spiral galaxy, may be a sign of stellar death. More »
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It's Friday, which means we could all use a touch of cosmic amazement to kick-start our work-numbed souls. Cue NASA's fantastic art showing the star-making machinery at the core of the galaxy. Even more of it below. More »
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Here are six of the most beautiful galaxies, "stripped bare" by a new camera. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, paired with the HAWK-l infrared camera, saw past the interstellar dust to show us just the galaxies themselves. More »
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Check out this just-released picture of globular cluster NGC 1806, created to look for evidence of MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) but none were found. No doubt this will spark yet another round of complaints about the decline of manliness. More »
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A new series of photos and artists' conceptions reveal in breathtaking detail the vicious world of galactic evolution, where spiral galaxies attract, shred, and assimilate nearby dwarf galaxies. Check out more images of our galaxy-eat-galaxy cosmos. More »
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That heart-shaped purple glow amidst that cluster of galaxies isn't bursting with love — it's dark matter, as measured by NASA's Cosmic Lens, and it may be our best clue to the mysterious nature of dark energy. More »
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Some of the universe's oldest galaxies appear to be going through the cosmic equivalent of a mid-life crisis, surrounding themselves with immense ultraviolet halos. These highly energetic rings of light make galaxies look young again, and astronomers are totally baffled. More »
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The universe's oldest galaxies are showing their whippersnapper counterparts a thing or two when it comes to producing baby stars. A shockingly modern-looking galactic cluster from ten billion years ago is churning out new stars in ways never before seen. More »
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This beauty is the spiral galaxy NGC 4911, located a third of a billion light-years away in the Coma Cluster of galaxies, one of the most tightly packed regions in the universe. More »
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Sometimes galaxies don't just smash into each other — sometimes they just tear each other apart with their gravitational forces. Check out this new Hubble image of NGC 1911 in the Coma Cluster, being torn asunder by neighboring galaxies. More »
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The Whirlpool Galaxy crashes into its dwarf companion, NGC 5195, and the insane forces of the collision form the galaxy's distinctive spiral "arms" of stars. Note the bright pink, showing hydrogen. That's just one of two insane new galaxy pictures. More »
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The Spitzer Space Telescope crew have stitched together 800,000 frames of data into an enormous mosaic of our galaxy. This is just a tiny glimpse of the whole shebang, showing the Milky Way's violent stellar coming of age. [APOD] More »
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Can a single galaxy support two mid-sized black holes? This one does. This composite image shows the starburst galaxy M82, with two intermediate-sized "survivor" black holes that have managed to avoid falling into the galactic core. More »
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See that bullet-shaped golden object in the galaxy cluster? That's Albert Einstein shooting down the competing theories to his General Theory Of Relativity. (Actually, it's X-ray data showing material flowing into a galaxy cluster, as a result of a merger.) More »
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The biggest galaxy in the Leo Triplet swaggers in the constellation of Leo, in this new image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Notice those assymetrical arms, which come from a powerful attraction to two neighboring galaxies. More »
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Behold a star from the second generation of generation of stars after the Big Bang, something scientists have been seeking for a while. Its unique make-up may prove that our galaxy developed by cannibalizing dwarf galaxies. More »
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Check out this galaxy's weird curved shape, almost like an arrow-head. That's because it's hurtling through the Fornax cluster 600 km per second. Picture it screaming in fear and exhilaration as it roars towards a galactic collision. More »
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If you've got the bandwidth, you can download the 706MB version of this image of spiral galaxy M81, showing individual stars, open and globular star clusters, and fluorescent gas clouds from 11.6 million light years away. More »
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Look at this new picture of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of our galaxy: It's alive with starlight. Sagittarius A eats much less stellar matter than a normal black hole, and this image provides a clue why. More »
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More proof we're living in a golden age for space images: Another new telescope, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (ViSTA) just started up, and already we have some gorgeous images. Click through to see a couple more. More »
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The Hubble Space Telescope's newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 took the deepest image of the universe ever in infrared light. The reddest and faintest galaxies date from just 600 million years after the Big Bang. More »
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This area near the core of the Pinwheel Galaxy turns out to be bursting with newborn stars, some only a few million years old. And there are about 60 supernova remnants, showing the full stellar life-cycle. [Hubble via Wired] More »
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Physicist Axel Mellinger pieced together this image of the night sky out of 3,000 individual images. Mellinger traveled 26,000 miles, taking images in South Africa, Texas and Michigan, then added data from two space probes. Yes, it's hardcore. More »
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The meeting of two black holes in the galaxy NGC 6240 started 30 million years ago, but the ending was known from the beginning: in the end, there can only be one super-massive black hole. [Chandra Observatory] More »
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Here's our best view ever of Barnard's Galaxy, a dwarf galaxy just 1.6 million light years away, courtesy of the European Southern Observatory's Chilean telescope. Those red bubbles are areas of intense star formation, marked by hot hydrogen. [via BadAstronomer] More »
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The center of our galaxy shines in greater detail than ever before, in this new composite image from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. (Click to enlarge.) The whole gamut of stellar evolution is here, from bright young stars to black holes. More »
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