Thanks to the discovery of five twinkling galaxies in a rare alignment, astronomers have been able to calculate — for the first time — the properties and geometry of an invisible gas cloud in space.
Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin / ICRAR) and The GLEAM Team
Some of the baby radio galaxies found may not be 'babies' at all. Rather, they may be 'angsty teens', rapidly growing into adults much faster than researchers had anticipated.
Elliptical galaxies are filled with extremely old stars.
Igor Chekalin/Shutterstock.com
COVID-19 may have messed up school and shut down a lot of entertainment venues. But you can still brighten things up by doing a little stargazing at night, an astronomer says.
This image of the NGC 1398 galaxy, which is located in the Fornax cluster, was taken with the Dark Energy Camera.
Dark Energy Survey/Flickr
Cosmologists had only been able to find half the matter that should exist in the universe. With the discovery of a new astronomical phenomenon and new telescopes, researchers just found the rest.
Thirty years ago the Hubble Space Telescope began snapping photos of distant stars, providing a time machine that has taken astronomers back to when the universe was less than a billion years old.
An enhanced image of galaxy clusters.
(NASA/Shutterstock)
The rate of the universe's expansion is in dispute. But a new kind of measurement offers hope.
The universe is home to a dizzying number of stars and planets. But the vast bulk of the universe is thought to be invisible dark matter.
Illustris Collaboration
Why do astronomers believe there's dark matter when it cannot be directly detected? Let's look at the evidence, and see what dark matter's presence means for our universe.
The Milky Way stretches across the sky near the Hungarian border village of Tachty in Slovakia.
EPA/PETER KOMKA