New images captured by Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope show clouds of cosmic dust threaded through the nebula Messier 78. The images were created by overlaying the APEX observations on a visible-light image in orange, allowing astronomers a closer look for studying the dusty clouds in which stars are born. Dust may sound boring and uninteresting [...]

Searching for dark matter and studying conventional models for the origin and evolution of the universe has led astronomers from the University of Bonn to assemble data in an effort to better understand what surrounds our galaxy. Their analysis of this data paints a new picture of our cosmic neighborhood, which appears to rule out [...]

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that the Sombrero galaxy, also known as NGC 4594, is one of the first known galaxies to exhibit dual characteristics, having both a round elliptical galaxy with a thin disk embedded inside. Located 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, scientists’ hope these findings will lead to a better [...]

Once scientists realized that their understanding of the distribution of galaxies was incorrect, researchers began studying the large scale structure of the universe to better understand the sum of all movements in relation to Earth. Now some forty years later, a newly published study gives an unprecedented account of all of the normal matter within [...]

A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 shows stellar grouping NGC 2040, also known as LH 88. These bright stars shining through what looks like a haze in the night sky are part of a young stellar grouping in one of the largest known star formation regions of [...]

A rare cosmic zoom lens, which uses the gravity of a large mass to magnify light from distant objects, has allowed a team of US and European astronomers to spot a galaxy so remote that its light was emitted 490 million years after the Big Bang, which is 3.6% of the Universe’s current age. The [...]

It’s hard to imagine planets that zip around at 30 million mph, but it was only a few years ago that astronomers found a “flying star” and now new research confirms that these runaway planets could be the fastest objects in our galaxy. Seven years ago, astronomers boggled when they found the first runaway star [...]

The power of the Hubble Space Telescope never ceases to amaze. Pictured above is the most detailed image ever taken of the globular cluster Messier 9, which is roughly 25,000 light-years from Earth and contains over 250,000 stars. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a [...]

This rare rectangular-shaped galaxy was located 70 million light-years away, 21 Mpc, in the Eridanus Group, in the constellation Eridanus. LEDA 074886 has been dubbed the emerald-cut galaxy, and was recently discovered by an international team of astronomers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. The findings will be published in Astrophysics Journal but [...]

While studying SN 2011fe and using X-ray and ultraviolet observations from NASA’s Swift satellite, researchers were able to provide new insights into the origins of Type Ia supernovae. Cambridge, Massachusetts – An exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova plays a key role in our understanding of the universe. Studies of Type Ia supernovae [...]

While looking over data from the Spitzer Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) and Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer Galactic (MIPSGAL) surveys, volunteers have discovered more than 5,000 “bubbles” in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. A team of volunteers has pored over observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and discovered more than [...]

Using gravitational lensing, a team of scientists believed they have observed dark matter in Abell 520. The dark matter is not behaving as predicted and is inconsistent with the observations of the Bullet Cluster, a colossal collision between two galaxy clusters which is recognized as an example of how dark matter should behave. Astronomers using [...]