Just as planets orbit Suns, galaxies can orbit each other. Now, NASA has created some unprecedented images of two such galaxies in the Milky Way's orbit, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC). Here, you have an incredible view of these galaxies beneath the plane of the Milky Way.

When you look up at the night sky, you're seeing the long-ago light from distant stars. But how can you know how far away they really are? You can't exactly roll out a measuring tape. Luckily, there's a way you can fix the position of galaxies in space, using the Tully-Fisher relation.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered the most distant galaxy seen in the universe. Called MACS0647-JD, the galaxy is 13.3 billion light years from Earth — which means it formed only 420 million years after the big bang. And just as remarkably, it's only 600 light-years wide,…

Check out the insane scale of this artist's representation of the Milky Way Galaxy, looking tiny and insignificant in the middle of a huge ball of hot gas. The image shows the hot gas extending with a radius of 300,000 light years — but NASA says it may "extend significantly further."

As a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way is far from unique. But what makes our galaxy particularly special is its pairing with the Magellanic Clouds — two irregular dwarf galaxies that are orbiting around it. Astronomers have never been able to find anything quite like it — at least not until now.

The Lowell Observatory's newest toy, the Discovery Channel Telescope, has finally gone online — and they've released super-snazzy pictures of three of our favorite galaxies to celebrate. Above is M109, a barred spiral galaxy 84 million light years from Earth.

According to predictive models, there should be thousands of ancient and tiny ‘dwarf galaxies' in our neighborhood — but to date, astronomers have found but a few. And those discovered contain puzzlingly few stars, giving rise to the name ‘ghost galaxies.' This problem has led to the theory that dwarf galaxies must…

When thinking about how galaxies form, scientists have speculated about large masses of gas that are drawn together to form a kind of embryonic proto-galaxy. But because these supposed objects are starless, they would be practically invisible, thus making them impossible to detect — or so it would seem.

Astronomers have confirmed that a bridge of hydrogen gas is streaming between the giant Andromeda Galaxy and its smaller neighbor, the Triangulum Galaxy. The connection is likely the result of a cosmological close call between the two, a discovery that will help scientists better understand the evolution of galaxies.

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.