There are probably more than a million planets in the universe for every single grain of sand on Earth. That’s a lot of planets. My guess is that there probably is life elsewhere in the Universe.
An artist’s impression of the path of star S2 as it passes very close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The very strong gravitational field causes the colour of the star to shift slightly to the red. (Size and colour exaggerated for clarity.)
ESO/M. Kornmesser
Astronomers traced a single star as it passed close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and detected the telltale signature of Einstein’s gravity in action.
Artist’s impression based on real picture of Icecube lab.
IceCube/NSF
Exactly 99 years after Einstein’s theory of general relativity was proven right in our own solar system, scientists show that it also holds true for entire galaxies.
Galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The inset image is the very distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, W. Zheng (JHU), M. Postman (STScI), the CLASH Team, Hashimoto et al.
Astronomers have indirectly spotted some of the first stars in the universe by making their most distant detection of oxygen in a galaxy that existed just 500m years after the Big Bang.
An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.
The Sombrero galaxy reveals the extremes of age and shape.
NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Black holes may come in many sizes, but there’s still a gap in the middle. The hunt is on to solve the mystery of where are the intermediate size black holes.
ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU
Massive, far distant galaxies contain 100 times more gas than we thought possible.
Here, an alien crew member, Saru on Star Trek: Discovery. We often rely on science fiction to guide our expectations of alien life. We can hope lessons about accepting beings very different from yourself can be extracted by the series end.
(Courtesy of CBS Studios)
Star Trek: Discovery explores our corner of the block – just a fraction of the galaxy. Some stars are better candidates for intelligent alien life, and it may not be anything like we imagine.
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.
Artist’s impression of a quasar shining through a galaxy’s ‘super halo’ of hydrogen gas.
A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
Astronomers are surprised by what they’re finding out about galaxies that formed in the early days of our universe, now that sensitive telescopes allow direct observation, not the inference of old.
Most modern spiral galaxies, such as NGC 1300, are thought to have loads of dark matter in their outer regions.
NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)