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 ...

Hubble and Gaia accurately weigh the Milky Way

In a striking example of multi-mission astronomy, measurements from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA Gaia mission have been combined to improve the estimate of the mass of our home galaxy the Milky Way: 1.5 ...

Astronomers now know how far the Earth is from 200 galaxies

On July 11, 2022, the very first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was released to the general public. It's called Webb's First Deep Field, centered on a cluster of galaxies named SMACS 0723 and containing ...

The Milky Way's primordial history and its fossil findings

Just as archaeologists dig hoping to find traces of the past, an international group of astrophysicists managed to get into the thick cloud of dust around the center of the Milky Way (also known as the bulge) discovering ...

The universe can't hide behind the Zone of Avoidance any longer

Our view of the cosmos is always limited by the fact we are located within a galaxy filled with interstellar gas and dust. This is most dramatically seen in the central region of the Milky Way, which is filled with so much ...

The galaxy cluster Abell 959

Most galaxies lie in clusters containing from a few to thousands of objects. Our Milky Way, for example, belongs to the Local Group, a cluster of about fifty galaxies whose other large member is the Andromeda galaxy about ...

Cosmic voids and galaxy clusters could upend Einstein

It will be possible to use new astronomical mappings of hundreds of thousands of cosmic voids and galaxy clusters to test Einstein's theory of relativity by looking for small deviations in gravity at vast distances – a ...

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