ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered an extremely distant galaxy making stars more than 2000 times faster than our own Milky Way. Seen at a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old, its mere existence challenges our theories of galaxy evolution. Artist’s impression of starburst galaxy HFLS3. The galaxy appears [continue reading]
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet formation is common in clusters, [continue reading]
Astronomers have released a new image of the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse – one of the nearest red supergiants to Earth – revealing the detailed structure of the matter being thrown off the star. The e-MERLIN image of Betelgeuse. Image Credit: University of Manchester The new image, taken by the e-MERLIN radio telescope array operated [continue reading]
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have shown for the first time that bursts of star formation have a major impact far beyond the boundaries of their host galaxy. These energetic events can affect galactic gas at distances of up to twenty times greater than the visible size of the galaxy – altering [continue reading]
April 24, 2013 NGC 4150, an elliptical galaxy in Coma Berenices Image Credit: NASA, ESA, R.M. Crockett (University of Oxford) S. Kaviraj (Imperial College London and University of Oxford), J. Silk (University of Oxford), M. Mutchler (Space Telescope Science Institute), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee NGC 4150 is an [continue reading]
A team of astronomers has used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope to pinpoint the locations of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. ALMA is so powerful that, in just a few hours, it captured as many observations of these galaxies as have been made by [continue reading]