Hubble views broad and sweeping spiral galaxy NGC 4731

This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the broad and sweeping spiral galaxy NGC 4731. It lies in the constellation Virgo and is located 43 million light-years from Earth. This highly detailed image ...

Astronomers find spark of star birth across billions of years

Astronomers have completed the largest and most detailed study of what triggers stars to form in the universe's biggest galaxies, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. They were surprised to find that ...

What was here before the solar system?

The solar system is old. Like, dial-up-fax-machine-old. 4.6 billion years to be specific. The solar system has nothing on the universe. It's been around for 13.8 billion years, give or take a few hundred million. That means ...

Star cluster shines in new look from NASA's Chandra

Westerlund 1 is the biggest and closest "super" star cluster to Earth. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, in combination with other NASA telescopes, is helping astronomers delve deeper into this galactic factory ...

A serendipitous gravitational lens

(PhysOrg.com) -- The path traveled by a light beam will bend in the presence of matter. This remarkable prediction, reached by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, was confirmed by observations of the solar eclipse ...

Giant cosmic tsunami wakes up comatose galaxies

Galaxies are often found in clusters, with many 'red and dead' neighbours that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Now an international team of astronomers, led by Andra Stroe of Leiden Observatory and David Sobral ...

Help! My stars are leaking!

Star clusters are wonderful test beds for theories of stellar formation and evolution. One of the key roles they play is to help astronomers understand the distribution of stellar masses as stars form (in other words, how ...

Suppressed star formation in the early universe

Massive clusters of galaxies, some with more mass than a hundred Milky Way galaxies, have been detected from cosmic epochs as early as about three billion years after the big bang. Their ongoing star formation makes them ...

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