galaxies

With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are now able to peer so far back in time that we are approaching the epoch where we think that the first galaxies were created. Throughout most of the history of the Universe,…

The spiral galaxy NGC 1532, also known as Haley's Coronet, is caught in a lopsided tug of war with its smaller neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 1531. The image -- taken by the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Dark Energy Camera mounted on the…

Black holes, some of the most captivating entities in the cosmos, possess an immense gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape. The groundbreaking detection of gravitational waves in 2015, caused by the coalescence of two…

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed, for the first time, starlight from two massive galaxies hosting actively growing black holes -- quasars -- seen less than a billion years after the Big Bang. A new study in…

Astronomers have found that supermassive black holes obscured by dust are more likely to grow and release tremendous amounts of energy when they are inside galaxies that are expected to collide with a neighbouring galaxy. The new work, led…

Like basketball scouts discovering a nimble, super-tall teenager, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope reported recently that they had identified a small, captivating group of baby galaxies near the dawn of time. These galaxies,…

A study using data from telescopes on Earth and in the sky resolves a problem plaguing astronomers working in the infrared and could help make better observations of the composition of the universe with the James Webb Space Telescope and…

Galaxy collisions are transformative events, largely responsible for driving the evolution of the Universe. The mixing and mingling of stellar material is an incredibly dynamic process that can lead to the formation of molecular clouds…

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, astronomers have discovered a large reservoir of hot gas in the still-forming galaxy cluster around the Spiderweb galaxy -- the most distant detection…

In late 2021, Salvatore Torquato, on sabbatical from Princeton's Department of Chemistry, reached across the aisle as it were and invited a young astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study to apply the tools of statistical mechanics…