Detecting cosmic ray particles: a water-Cherenkov detector seen against the night sky at the Pierre Auger Observatory in western Argentina.
Steven Saffi, University of Adelaide
Scientists say they now know that high energy cosmic ray particles that bombard Earth are coming from outside our galaxy. But the actual source still remains a mystery.
So many galaxies viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope: but what’s their real shape in 3D?
NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz and the HFF Team (STScI)
The first reliable measure of the 3D shape of galaxies and their rotation helps to shed light on their history.
Part of the new map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey.
Chihway Chang/University of Chicago/DES collaboration
What caused the Big Bang is still a mystery. And that’s just one of the many unanswered questions, in spite of everything we do know about the birth of the Universe.
ESO provides new ways to access the southern sky for Australian astronomy.
ESO/José Francisco Salgado
People used to think that when they looked up at the night sky, they were seeing all of space. Then American astronomer Edwin Hubble found out something so amazing, NASA named a telescope after him.
Artist’s impression of ZF-COSMOS-20115, a galaxy that stopped making new stars and rapidly turned into a compact red galaxy.
The recipe book for galaxy formation may need to be rewritten after the discovery of a massive galaxy that stopped making new stars early in the Universe’s history.
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder uses several telescopes to survey the sky.
CSIRO
After months of running in test-mode, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope is now gathering data at an incredible rate to give us a new look at how our universe works.
Jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can transport huge amounts of energy across great distances.
REUTERS/X-ray: NASA/CXC/Tokyo Institute of Technology/J.Kataoka et al
It’s difficult to get jets - powerful, lightning fast particles - to give up their secrets. The new Square Kilometre Array radio telescope could hold the key to solving jets’ mysteries.
Light from the universe’s first galaxies destroyed the hydrogen atoms that formed during the Big Bang.
NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team
What’s particularly exciting about “first light” images from South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope is that they prove Africa is a rising star in the world of astronomy.
Spiral galaxy NGC 3953 is a veritable star making machine, but why do some galaxies stop forming new stars?
NASA-Sloan Atlas
The find by citizen scientists of at least 40 galaxies in a cluster more than a billion light years away is the astronomical equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.
An artist’s impression of the galaxies found in the ‘Zone of Avoidance’ behind our Milky Way.
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research
Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they’re figuring it out.
Images of galaxies far away may be forever blurred – no matter how big the telescope.
NASA/Hubble
Telescopes are getting larger and larger as astronomers are hoping to get a good view of the most distant objects in space. But, it turns out, bigger isn’t always better.
Supermassive black holes, containing as much mass as millions or billions of suns, exist at the centre of all galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center