Virtual 'universe machine' sheds light on galaxy evolution

How do galaxies such as our Milky Way come into existence? How do they grow and change over time? The science behind galaxy formation has remained a puzzle for decades, but a University of Arizona-led team of scientists is ...

What happens when galaxies collide?

We don't want to scare you, but our own Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda, the closest spiral galaxy to our own. At some point during the next few billion years, our galaxy and Andromeda – which also happen ...

ALMA observes the formation sites of solar-system-like planets

Researchers have spotted the formation sites of planets around a young star resembling the sun. Two rings of dust around the star, at distances comparable to the asteroid belt and the orbit of Neptune in the solar system, ...

Galactic crash may have triggered solar system formation

The formation of the Sun, the Solar System and the subsequent emergence of life on Earth may be a consequence of a collision between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and a smaller galaxy called Sagittarius, discovered in the 1990s ...

Fornax A galaxy investigated with AstroSat

Using the AstroSat spacecraft, Indian astronomers have performed an imaging and spectroscopic study of the Fornax A galaxy. Results of the study, published January 13 on the arXiv preprint server, provide more clues on the ...

Rare galaxy found furiously burning fuel for stars

Astronomers have found a galaxy turning gas into stars with almost 100 percent efficiency, a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed. The findings come from the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer ...

ALMA discovers massive rotating disk in early universe

In our 13.8 billion-year-old universe, most galaxies like our Milky Way form gradually, reaching their large mass relatively late. But a new discovery made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of a ...

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Star formation

Star formation is the process by which dense parts of molecular clouds collapse into a ball of plasma to form a star. As a branch of astronomy star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to the star formation process and the study of young stellar objects and planet formation as its immediate products. Star formation theory, as well as accounting for the formation of a single star, must also account for the statistics of binary stars and the initial mass function.

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