When it comes to galaxies, how fast is fast? The Milky Way, an average spiral galaxy, spins at a speed of 130 miles per second (210 km/sec) in our Sun's neighborhood. New research has found that the most massive spiral galaxies ...
Astronomy
Oct 17, 2019
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Most galaxies host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their nucleus, one whose mass exceeds a million solar-masses. When material actively accretes onto the SMBH, associated processes can produce an active galactic nucleus ...
Astronomy
Oct 14, 2019
0
379
A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and ...
Astronomy
Oct 06, 2019
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3768
According to the most widely accepted cosmological models, the first galaxies began to form between 13 and 14 billion years ago. Over the course of the next billion years, the cosmic structures now observed first emerged. ...
Astronomy
Oct 04, 2019
2
123
An international group of scientists led by the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research has used observations from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the Suprime-Cam ...
Astronomy
Oct 03, 2019
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645
This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a cloud of gas and dust full of bubbles, which are inflated by wind and radiation from young, massive stars. Each bubble is filled with hundreds to thousands of ...
Astronomy
Sep 30, 2019
2
618
ESA's X-ray space telescope XMM-Newton has detected never-before-seen periodic flares of X-ray radiation coming from a distant galaxy that could help explain some enigmatic behaviours of active black holes.
Astronomy
Sep 12, 2019
6
394
When it comes to making new stars, the party is almost over in the present-day universe. In fact, it's been nearly over for billions of years. Our Milky Way continues to form the equivalent of one Sun every year. But in the ...
Astronomy
Aug 22, 2019
1
744
The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was the first to muse about the structure of snowflakes. Why are they so symmetrical? How does one side know how long the opposite side has grown? Kepler thought it was all down ...
General Physics
Aug 08, 2019
18
314
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers has investigated a population of massive stars in the young cluster VVV CL074. The observations resulted in disclosing fundamental properties of ...
