Images from the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History (SMASH) reveal a striking family portrait of our galactic neighbors—the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The images represent a portion of the second data release ...
Astronomy
Dec 2, 2020
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363
The spiral-shaped disk of stars and planets is being pulled, twisted and deformed with extreme violence by the gravitational force of a smaller galaxy—the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
Astronomy
Nov 23, 2020
2
485
A pair of University of Michigan studies reveals how some massive stars—stars eight or more times the mass of our sun—become isolated in the universe: most often, their star clusters kick them out.
Astronomy
Oct 30, 2020
0
96
The Milky Way is not alone in its neighborhood. It has captured smaller galaxies in its orbit, and the two largest are known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible as twin dusty smears in the Southern Hemisphere.
Astronomy
Sep 9, 2020
10
729
As Carl Sagan famously said, "We're made of star stuff"—but how do stars distribute their essential "stuff" for life into space? NASA's telescope on an airplane, SOFIA, is finding some answers by watching pulsating stars ...
Astronomy
Aug 6, 2020
0
8
A new ultra-bright source of X-rays has awakened in between our galactic neighbors the Magellanic Clouds, after a 26-year slumber. This is the second-closest such object known to date, with a brightness greater than a million ...
Astronomy
Jun 3, 2020
1
470
About 3.5 million years ago, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy unleashed an enormous burst of energy. Our primitive ancestors, already afoot on the African plains, likely would have witnessed ...
Astronomy
Jun 2, 2020
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8992
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's iconic images and scientific breakthroughs have redefined our view of the Universe. To commemorate three decades of scientific discoveries, this image is one of the most photogenic examples ...
Astronomy
Apr 24, 2020
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515
Just as the sun has planets and the planets have moons, our galaxy has satellite galaxies, and some of those might have smaller satellite galaxies of their own. To wit, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively large ...
Astronomy
Apr 6, 2020
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2414
A supernova in a nearby galaxy may have originated from an explosion of a blue supergiant formed by the merger of two stars, simulations by RIKEN astrophysicists suggest. The asymmetric nature of this explosion may provide ...
Astronomy
Mar 19, 2020
4
474
