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.
The edge of the Horsehead nebula, where it touches the empty space outside it, is rich in carbon.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Astronomers have built a new observatory in the cold dry air of a high plateau in Antarctica to peer through our atmosphere and observe carbon in our galaxy.
Like a cosmic roulette wheel, we exist because of a very lucky combination of factors.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
If some of the laws of physics were only infinitesimally different, we would simply not exist. It almost looks like the universe itself was built for life. But how can that be?
NASA artists’ interpretation of the neutron star Swift J1749.4-2807 (left) with it’s companion star (right).
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
They’re are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
A colour image of G63349, one of the galaxies in the survey, created using near-infrared (VISTA telescope) and optical (Sloan telescope) data collated by the GAMA survey. (The bright green object is a nearby star.)
ICRAR/GAMA
Researchers have created a star-forming cloud in the laboratory to try to recreate the first-ever biological molecule. The study could explain why such molecules are left-handed.
Elliptical galaxies, like this one, are burnt out and no longer making stars.
Judy Schmidt and J Blakeslee (Dominion Astrophysical Observatory)
Tanya Hill, Museums Victoria Research Institute; Amanda Bauer, Australian Astronomical Observatory, and Sarah Brough, Australian Astronomical Observatory
What happens to a galaxy when it runs out of the stuff needed to forge new stars?
Artist’s impression of exocomets around Beta Pictoris.
ESO/L. Calçada
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Tanya Hill, Museums Victoria Research Institute
A detailed study of comets orbiting the young nearby star Beta Pictoris is published today in the journal Nature, and it reveals striking similarities to the comets found in our solar system. Over the…
An artist’s impression of a galactic protocluster forming in the early universe.
European Southern Observatory
Clusters of galaxies have back-stories worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster: their existences are marked by violence, death and birth, arising after extragalactic pile-ups where groups of galaxies crashed…
The dawn of a new day.
Flickr/Christos Tsoumplekas
What makes our sun shine has been a mystery for most of human history. Given our sun is a star and stars are suns, explaining the source of the sun’s energy would help us understand why stars shine. An…
There are some massive galaxies out there, and we now know a little about their early life.
Lauro Roger McAllister/Flickr
A piece of the galaxy formation puzzle may have fallen into place, thanks to a team of European and American astronomers peering into the depths of our early universe. According to new research published…
If gas clouds collided to create big stars, they might look like this during the collision. This is the RCW120 Spitzer Bubble.
NASA
The current theory of star formation has a problem: it cannot make big stars. In the standard star-making recipe, stars are formed in the depths of gas clouds made from molecular hydrogen. These clouds…