Mergers between galaxies trigger activity in their core

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) play a major role in galaxy evolution. Astronomers from SRON and RuG have now used a record-setting sample of galaxies to confirm that galaxy mergers have a positive effect on igniting AGNs. ...

Astronomers develop new tool to find merging galaxies

Today, at the 233rd AAS meeting in Seattle, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) announce that they have developed a new tool to find otherwise-hidden galaxy mergers in data from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies ...

Natural telescope sets new magnification record

Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution—gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. Now, an ...

The material that obscures supermassive black holes

Cristina Ramos Almeida, researcher at the IAC, and Claudio Ricci, from the Institute of Astronomy of the Universidad Católica de Chile, have published a review in Nature Astronomy on the material that obscures active galactic ...

Galactic David and Goliath

The gravitational dance between two galaxies in our local neighbourhood has led to intriguing visual features in both as witnessed in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The tiny NGC 1510 and its colossal neighbour ...

Hubble spots a lopsided Lynx

This galaxy, known as NGC 2337, resides 25 million light-years away in the constellation of Lynx. NGC 2337 is an irregular galaxy, meaning that it—along with a quarter of all galaxies in the universe—lacks a distinct, ...

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