Image: Black hole caught in a stellar homicide

(Phys.org) -- This computer-simulated image shows gas from a star that is ripped apart by tidal forces as it falls into a black hole. Some of the gas also is being ejected at high speeds into space.

Stellar winds

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Sun, glowing with a surface temperature of about 5500 degrees Celsius, warms the Earth with its salutary light. Meanwhile the Sun's hot outer layer (the corona), with its temperature of over a million ...

A cosmic exclamation point

(PhysOrg.com) -- VV 340, also known as Arp 302, provides a textbook example of colliding galaxies seen in the early stages of their interaction. The edge-on galaxy near the top of the image is VV 340 North and the face-on ...

Astronomers explain why disk galaxies eventually look alike

(Phys.org) —It happens to all kinds of flat, disk galaxies – whether they're big, little, isolated or crowded in a cluster. They all grow out of their irregular, clumped appearance and their older stars take on the same ...

NASA's SkyView Delivers the Multiwavelength Cosmos

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some three million times a year, researchers, educators, and amateur astronomers all over the world ask NASA's SkyView virtual observatory to serve up images of some interesting corner of the cosmos. Since ...

Giant ultraviolet rings found in resurrected galaxies

Astronomers have found mysterious, giant loops of ultraviolet light in aged, massive galaxies, which seem to have a second lease on life. Somehow these "over-the-hill galaxies" have been infused with fresh gas to form new ...

A super cluster of galaxies

(Phys.org)—Most galaxies lie in clusters, groupings of several to many thousands of galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy itself is a member of the "Local Group," a band of about fifty galaxies whose other large member is the ...

Galaxy growth examined like rings of a tree

(Phys.org) —Watching a tree grow might be more frustrating than waiting for a pot to boil, but luckily for biologists, there are tree rings. Beginning at a tree trunk's dense core and moving out to the soft bark, the passage ...

Galaxy cluster hidden in plain view

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of astronomers has discovered the most distant cluster of red galaxies ever observed using FourStar, a new and powerful near-infrared camera on the 6.5m Magellan Baade Telescope. The galaxy cluster ...

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