galaxies
Webb Watches the Most Distant Galactic Merger Ever Seen
Astronomers know that galaxies form through mergers. They've been happening since the earliest epochs of cosmic time. Using the Webb…
Astronomers Find the Most Massive Supercluster to Date
The Earth’s place in space is a fairly familiar one with it orbiting an average star. The star - our…
Are Andromeda and the Milky Way Already Exchanging Stars?
I often drag out the amazing fact that the Andromeda Galaxy, that faint fuzzy blob just off the corner of…
Black Holes Need Refreshing Cold Gas to Keep Growing
How were supermassive black holes able to grow so rapidly in the early Universe? Galactic mergers were believed to be…
This Galaxy Was Already Dead When the Universe Was Only 700 Million Years Old
When a galaxy runs out of gas and dust, the process of star birth stops. That takes billions of years.…
Dwarf Galaxies Banished the Darkness and Lit Up the Early Universe
During the Universe's Dark Ages, dense primordial gas absorbed and scattered light, prohibiting it from travelling. Only when the first…
Powerful Jets From a Black Hole are Spawning Star Clusters
Supermassive black holes are messy feeders, and when they're gorging on too much material, they can hurl high-energy jets into…
JWST Sees a Milky Way-Like Galaxy Coming Together in the Early Universe
The gigantic galaxies we see in the Universe today, including our own Milky Way galaxy, started out far smaller. Mergers…
Even if We Can’t See the First Stars, We Could Detect Their Impact on the First Galaxies
For a long time, our understanding of the Universe's first galaxies leaned heavily on theory. The light from that age…
Hubble Sees a Bridge of Stars Connecting Two Galaxies
The poetic-minded among us like to point out how Nature is a dance. If they're right, then galaxies sometimes form…