Unusual galaxy set to prompt rethink on how structures in the Universe form Full paper, Full video, and images available. Details below. Astronomers have captured an image of a super-rare type of galaxy – described as a “cosmic ring of fire” – as it existed 11 billion years ago. The galaxy, which has roughly the mass of…
Full paper available here, read on for media release, photos, captions and background information. Modelling shows big galaxies get bigger by merging with smaller ones Galaxies grow large by eating their smaller neighbours, new research reveals. Exactly how massive galaxies attain their size is poorly understood, not least because they swell over billions of years….
Data gathered by NASA’s now defunct Kepler telescope provides a solution to an astronomical mystery. Star-quakes recorded by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have helped answer a long-standing question about the age of the “thick disc” of the Milky Way. In a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team…
Researchers find evidence of a cataclysmic flare that punched so far out of the Galaxy its impact was felt 200,000 light years away. 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…
Researchers hunt for a 12-billion-year-old signal that marks the end of the post Big Bang “dark age”. Astronomers are closing in on a signal that has been travelling across the Universe for 12 billion years, bringing them nearer to understanding the life and death of the very earliest stars. In a paper on the preprint…
Australian-led astronomers find the most iron-poor star in the Galaxy, hinting at the nature of the first stars in the Universe. A newly discovered ancient star containing a record-low amount of iron carries evidence of a class of even older stars, long hypothesised but assumed to have vanished. In a paper published in the journal…