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.
What could force a supermassive black hole (SMBH) out of its host galaxy? They can have hundreds of millions, even billions of solar masses. What's powerful enough to dislodge one of these behemoths?
Astronomy
Dec 15, 2025
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The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and the SMC is about 206,000 light-years away, and their close proximity makes ...
Astronomy
Dec 14, 2025
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Most smaller galaxies may not have supermassive black holes in their centers, according to a recent study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This contrasts with the common idea that nearly every galaxy has one of these ...
Astronomy
Dec 11, 2025
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By analyzing the data from the PHANGS-MUSE survey, an international team of astronomers has inspected a nuclear star cluster of the nearby large spiral galaxy Messier 74. The new study presented Dec. 3 on the arXiv pre-print ...
Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the universe held together by gravity, containing up to several thousand individual galaxies and huge reservoirs of superheated, X-ray-emitting gas. The mass of this hot gas ...
Astronomy
Dec 10, 2025
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Clues about how galaxies like our Milky Way form and evolve and why their stars show surprising chemical patterns have been revealed by a new study.
Astronomy
Dec 8, 2025
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If you look across space with a telescope, you'll see countless galaxies, most of which host large central black holes, billions of stars and their attendant planets. The universe teems with huge, spectacular objects, and ...
Astronomy
Dec 4, 2025
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An international team led by the University of Oxford has identified one of the largest rotating structures ever reported: a "razor-thin" string of galaxies embedded in a giant spinning cosmic filament, 140 million light-years ...
Astronomy
Dec 3, 2025
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Galaxies like our Milky Way grew through cascading mergers of smaller galaxies that began billions of years ago. The ancient progenitors of galaxies like ours were small galaxies similar to modern-day dwarf galaxies like ...
Astronomy
Dec 3, 2025
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Astronomers have long debated the role of galaxy mergers in powering active supermassive black holes. Now an unprecedented dataset of a million galaxies from the Euclid telescope provides evidence that mergers play a dominant ...
Astronomy
Dec 2, 2025
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