Galaxies are gravitationally bound, large-scale astrophysical systems composed primarily of dark matter, stars, stellar remnants, gas, and dust, often embedded in extended dark matter halos. They exhibit diverse morphologies, including spiral, elliptical, and irregular types, and span mass scales from roughly 10⁷ to over 10¹² solar masses. Their internal dynamics are governed by gravity and angular momentum distribution, with baryonic components organized into disks, bulges, and halos, and frequently hosting central supermassive black holes. Galaxies are fundamental units of cosmic structure formation, participating in hierarchical assembly, mergers, and interactions within larger environments such as groups, clusters, and filaments of the cosmic web.
Galaxy clusters are formed by a dense packing of many galaxies, making them the most massive structures in the universe. Their progenitors, protoclusters, show these galaxies in their infancy, offering a window to study how ...
Astronomy
Jan 8, 2026
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Astronomers have created a detailed forecast of where they expect to observe future stellar explosions in a nearby galaxy, opening a new window into how exploding stars shape the cosmos. Focusing on M33, a spiral galaxy about ...
Astronomy
Jan 7, 2026
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Astronomers from Serbia and Russia have conducted deep optical observations of a cloud of neutral atomic hydrogen, designated FAST J0139+4328. Results of the observational campaign, published December 31 on the arXiv preprint ...
After combing through NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's archive of sweeping extragalactic cosmic fields, a small team of astronomers at the University of Missouri says they have identified a sample of galaxies that have ...
Astronomy
Jan 6, 2026
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Astronomers have captured the most detailed look yet at faraway galaxies at the peak of their youth, an active time when the adolescent galaxies were fervently producing new stars.
Astronomy
Jan 6, 2026
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Scientists at the University of Missouri have identified a small group of unusual objects in the early universe. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Haojing Yan and his team at Mizzou's College of Arts and Science ...
Astronomy
Jan 6, 2026
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A team using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object—a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud that is considered a "relic" or remnant of early galaxy formation. Nicknamed "Cloud-9," ...
Astronomy
Jan 5, 2026
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An international team of astronomers has uncovered multiple evolutionary paths for the universe's most massive galaxies. Observations of ultramassive galaxies, each containing more than 100 billion stars, show that less than ...
Astronomy
Jan 5, 2026
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Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core. Whether the black hole forms first and then the galaxy around it—or the other way around—is still a matter of some debate, but we know the evolution of both are ...
Astronomy
Jan 5, 2026
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Using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an international team of astronomers has discovered a spectacular bipolar outflow from the disk of a nearby galaxy known as ESO 130-G012. The finding was reported ...
