Space Station Threshold

Dive right in to this image that contains a sea of distant galaxies! The Very Large Telescope has obtained the deepest ground-based image in the ultraviolet band, and here, you can see this patch of the sky is almost completely covered by galaxies, each one, like our own Milky Way galaxy, and home of [...]

Halloween means its time for ghost stories and here's a mysterious astronomical story about the "Ghost of Mirach." When viewed in visible light, as in the picture above on the left, the galaxy called NGC 404 appears as just a white blob. Mirach is a red giant star that looms large in visible light, [...]

Using gravitational lensing, astronomers have been able to see a young star-forming galaxy in the distant universe as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang. Appropriately enough, the galaxy used as a zoom lens was the "Cosmic Eye" galaxy, named so because through the effect of gravitational lensing, it looks like [...]

It's a violent universe out there! Yesterday we ran an article about galaxies colliding and forming fireballs. Today, there's more evidence for galactic collisions, and it's not good news for potential stars. While this image is stunning, such collisions could spell doom for future star formation. A deep new [...]

During routine observations of the Coma Cluster of galaxies using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers discovered a thread-like structure stretching from one of the galaxies. The astronomers determined this filament was about 260 thousand light years long, and spectral analysis of the filament suggested a younger age toward the outer edge ...

Everyone is suffering from severe angst about the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope, and now, on the heels of Hubble's data controller failure news comes more ANGST. But this is a good ANGST – which is an acronym that stands for ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) [...]

A team of astronomers has discovered the least luminous, most dark matter-filled galaxy known to exist. The Segue 1 galaxy is one of about two dozen small satellite galaxies orbiting our own Milky Way. This is a very faint galaxy, a billion times less bright than the Milky Way. But despite its small [...]

This Hubble Space Telescope image of two spiral galaxies shows an interesting feature on the smaller galaxy. Silhouetted in front of the larger background galaxy is a small galaxy, and tentacles of dust can be seen extending beyond the small galaxy's disk of starlight. Skeletal tentacles of dust can be seen extending beyond [...]

When you stir cream in your coffee or tea, does the swirl stay the same or does it change as it spins in your cup? As galaxies form and swirl, the motions and eddies may actually cause stars to move within the galaxy. A long-standing scientific belief holds that stars tend to hang [...]

What a great way to start the day, with a gorgeous image like this one of the galaxy Messier 83, adorned with what looks like rubies on the spiral arms. This shot was captured by the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory, located high in the dry desert mountains of the Chilean [...]