What if the mysterious ‘Little Red Dots’ aren’t baby black holes, but rather globular clusters in their messy, glorious formation?
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The Hubble and Euclid space telescopes caught a stunning portrait of a dying star at the heart of the Cat’s Eye Nebula.
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The Milky Way nebula RCW 36 resembles a stunning cosmic bird of prey in an incredible Very Large Telescope image.
The galaxy NGC 941 was imaged by the Subaru Telescope at the summit of Maunakea, Hawai’i.
The JUICE spacecraft captured its first detailed glimpse of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, revealing a glowing coma and sweeping tail.
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Astronomers have dived into the turbulent and chaotic heart of the Milky Way, discovering hidden chemistry around our galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
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In the vast tapestry of the universe, most galaxies shine brightly across cosmic time and space. Yet a rare class of galaxies remains nearly invisible — low-surface-brightness galaxies dominated by dark matter and containing only a sparse scattering of faint stars. One such elusive object, dubbed CDG-2, may be among the most heavily dark matter-dominated […]
The broadest planned survey by NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will reveal hundreds of millions of galaxies scattered across the cosmos. After Roman launches as soon as this fall, scientists will use these sparkly beacons to study the universe’s shadowy underpinnings: dark matter and dark energy. “We set out to build the ultimate […]
Astronomers have discovered powerful magnetic fields steering gas, dust, and star formation in a dramatic galaxy merger.
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. A lenticular, meaning “lens-shaped,” galaxy is a type whose classification sits between more familiar spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. It is also less common than spirals and ellipticals — partly because […]