galactic evolution
Polar Ring Galaxies Are Bizarre and Rare. Astronomers Just Found Two More
Many galaxies resemble the Milky Way, with billions of stars organized into a rotating, rotating spiral. There are other irregular…
The Milky Way's Disk is Warped. Is That Because our Dark Matter Halo is Tilted?
Astronomers have measured the Milky Way's shape and found that the disk is warped and not a flat spiral like…
The Early Universe Should Be Awash in Active Galaxies, but JWST Isn't Finding Them
Astronomers have found supermassive black holes in the centers of most galaxies. To get the black holes we see today,…
Could This Supermassive Black Hole Only Have Formed by Direct Collapse?
One of the outstanding mysteries in astronomy is how supermassive black holes gained so much mass so early in the…
What Would the Milky Way Look Like From Afar?
Even though we're embedded inside the Milky Way, we don't know precisely what our galaxy looks like. Astronomers have had…
New Clues to the Formation of Globular Clusters: Their Ultramassive Stars
New images from JWST have revealed the light from a globular cluster in this earliest epoch, showing that it contains…
JWST Fails to Disprove the Big Bang
The James Webb Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to see deeper into cosmic history than ever before, but it doesn't…
A Star was Blocking a Galaxy, but Now it’s Moved Enough That Astronomers can Finally Examine What it Was Hiding
One of the biggest puzzles in astronomy, and one of the hardest ones to solve, concerns the formation and evolution…
How Do Stars Get Kicked Out of Globular Clusters?
Globular clusters are densely-packed collections of stars bound together gravitationally in roughly-shaped spheres. They contain hundreds of thousands of stars.…
The Dark Energy Camera has Captured a Million Images, an Eighth of the Entire sky. Here are Some of its Best Pictures so far
The Dark Energy Survey recently released 15 images that showcase the types of objects it viewed during the six-year campaign.