For billions of years, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet – to the puzzlement of astronomers – these dwarf galaxies remain […]
Nature likes spirals – from the whirlpool of a hurricane, to pinwheel-shaped protoplanetary disks around newborn stars, to the vast realms of spiral galaxies across our universe. Now astronomers are bemused to find young stars that are spiraling into the center of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of […]
Thousands of never-before-seen young stars spotted in a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, called Tarantula Nebula owing to its appearance in dusty filaments. The nebula has long been a favorite for astronomers studying star formation and the Webb has been revealing beautiful distant background galaxies, as well as […]
Astronomers have successfully traced a spiral arm on the far side of our Galaxy, an accomplishment that provides new insights into the structure of the Milky Way. Efforts to observe the far side of our Galaxy have been hampered by the vast distance and interstellar dust that blocks optical light from those regions. Here, Alberto […]
Using Albert Einstein’s gravitational lensing theory, scientists have discovered a galaxy at about 10,000 million light years away but thousand times brighter than the nearest Milky Way. Anastasio Diaz-Sanches from Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain used gravitational lensing phenomenon found by Einstein to magnify the apparent image of the original object. “Thanks to […]