The quiet life of Messier 94

Just like a murder of crows, a shrewdness of apes and a murmuration of starlings, tightly packed stars of a similar age within the center of a galaxy have a collective name: a bulge.

Astronomers discover how galaxies form through mergers

Astronomers in the UK announce today that have established how galaxies like our own Milky Way formed over 10 billion years of cosmic time through an abundance of separate galaxies colliding together.

Image: Hubble captures swirling galactic trio

The mass of dust and bright swirls of stars in this image are the distant galaxy merger IC 2431, which lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer.

Giant, low-surface-brightness galaxies

Forty years ago, astronomers using sensitive new imaging techniques discovered a class of large, faint galaxies they named low-surface-brightness galaxies. Giant low-surface-brightness galaxies (gLSBGs) are a subset whose ...

A barred galaxy's massive molecular inflow

Large amounts of gas are sometimes funneled to a galaxy's nuclear regions, with profound consequences. The gas triggers starburst activity and can also feed the supermassive black hole, converting it into an active galactic ...

Galaxy mergers could limit star formation

Astronomers have looked nine billion years into the past to find evidence that galaxy mergers in the early universe could shut down star formation and affect galaxy growth.

Family tree of the Milky Way deciphered

Scientists have known for some time that galaxies can grow by the merging of smaller galaxies, but the ancestry of our own Milky Way galaxy has been a long-standing mystery. Now, an international team of astrophysicists has ...

page 2 from 7