andromeda galaxy

In the dense galaxy cluster Abell 2744, where gravity bends light like a lens, the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a new point of light. It appeared in images from 2023 and then began to change brightness. It was a supernova, the explosion of a dying star, but not just any kind: a Type IIP.

The night sky only looks black: telescopes reveal millions of galaxies, but some are so dim they blend into the background. Astronomers caught just such a "nearly invisible" one by chance while observing the Virgo Cluster with the two-meter telescope at Teide Observatory. The galaxy is named TTT J1237327+143535.

Red giants in the center of the Milky Way resemble distant lighthouses that brighten and dim. Their light pierces through dense dust, but standard distance-measuring methods fail here: the stars are too bright and unstable, and dust distorts the picture. Astronomers found a workaround.

The Andromeda galaxy is our nearest large neighbor, and like the Milky Way, it has an invisible gaseous shroud. This shroud of extremely hot, rarefied gas extends for hundreds of thousands of light-years. Seeing it directly is nearly impossible — the gas is too faint.

Two galaxies (our Milky Way and its satellite, the Large Magellanic Cloud) slowly circle each other. Their gravitational pull stirs the distant outskirts of the Milky Way, like a pebble thrown into a pond makes the water ripple.

The cosmic spectacle unfolds on the stage of Galaxy галактики Centaurus A. In the lead role: a supermassive сверхмассивная чёрная дыра with a powerful jet that pierces space for hundreds of thousands of light-years.

The standard cosmological model ΛCDM, where dark matter and dark energy act as the chief architects of the cosmos, has predicted astronomical data with Swiss-watch precision for decades. Its foundation was laid by three geniuses.

The cosmological principle – the notion that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large scales – has guarded our understanding of the world since the time of Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître, whose ideas formed the basis of the Big Bang model.

The early Universe is often imagined as a nursery: most galaxies there are amorphous blobs, rowdy and irregular, choking on gas and bursts of star formation.

For 23 years, Hubble and James Webb have peered into the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster where millions of stars crowd into a space just 150 light-years across. In this stellar beehive, the motion of the stars betrayed an invisible partner: a main-sequence star (one that has not yet left the main evolutionary branch) seemed to be tugged in a dance with an unseen weight.

The Universe at 700 million years old was a noisy construction site, just beginning to light up. Telescopes caught a signal from that distant epoch: the galaxy REBELS-25, massive and full of stellar fuel.

The stellar halo of the Milky Way is a galactic palimpsest: an ancient manuscript where earlier layers lie hidden beneath the visible text. For a long time, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) structure was thought to be the final entry in this manuscript, the scar of a single catastrophic merger.

A magnifying glass focuses sunlight into a bright point. If the glass has a tiny flaw, the spot of light becomes distorted. Gravitational lensing works in a similar way: a massive galaxy bends light rays from a more distant source, creating an enlarged and sometimes distorted image.

A spotlight shines through a dark hall. Between the lamp and the wall, an invisible lens drifts by, and the spot of light briefly brightens and shifts. That is exactly what the DECam telescope, aimed at the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, was watching for five consecutive nights.

For nearly half a century, astronomers have been searching for glycine, the simplest amino acid and one of the fundamental building blocks of proteins, in the interstellar medium.

Around our Galaxy, like an invisible crown, stretches a tenuous cloud of gas heated to millions of degrees. It is called the galactic halo. Seeing this glow directly is difficult: it emits soft X-rays that are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.

Imagine a dark room with dust floating in the air. A bright flashlight goes off, and the dust particles light up, revealing their positions. Astronomers have applied a similar trick to our Galaxy. The flashlights were gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in distant galaxies, and the dust particles were interstellar clouds.

A distant city seen through a fogged-up window: bright lights blur, details are lost. That's roughly how astronomers see gas with magnesium ions (magnesium) in our galaxy — the strongest spectral lines "peg the needle," preventing us from knowing how much material is really there.

A handful of coins accelerates to one-fifth the speed of light. That's what Coracle interstellar probes will be like — tiny spacecraft weighing just a few grams, each with an ultrathin sail film. A powerful laser beam pushes them forward: light presses on the sail like wind fills a yacht's sails, except instead of air, it's a stream of photons.

The universe keeps a tally of every newborn star. Over 13.8 billion years, galaxies have ignited so many stars that their 'census' can reveal the nature of the cosmos itself, just as tree rings reveal past climates.

About 11 billion years ago, the Milky Way suffered a head-on collision. Not with an asteroid, but with an entire smaller galaxy. It slammed into ours and was torn apart like a puff of flour hit by a fist. Astronomers call this cosmic scar Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (after the shape of the orbits of its remaining stars).

In a dense cloud of gas and dust where giant stars are born, the ALMA telescope has spotted something familiar. Four thin gas jets shoot out from the same region, each leaving behind a chain of bright knots, like a dashed line.

On the outskirts of our Galaxy, far beyond the familiar stellar disk, the Subaru Telescope has spotted something unexpected: a scattered cloud of stars spanning an area of one hundred square degrees across the sky.

A fountain shoots from the center of the city at a speed thousands of times faster than a courier bike. Such a 'fountain'—a stream of gas accelerated to 5500 kilometers per second — has been spotted by astronomers in the galaxy GLIMPSED-329380.

Through a telescope, you can see a galaxy that looks like a giant glowing pinwheel. Its disk stretches thirty thousand light-years across — a third of the diameter of our Milky Way. But the most astonishing part: this pinwheel already existed just two billion years after the birth of the universe.

The companion of the star HIP 53005 has stumped astronomers. Its color and brightness and spectrum point to a mass of about 80 Jupiters — right at the hydrogen-burning limit, where an object is no longer a planet but not yet a star. Yet its orbital motion demands nearly twice that mass: 185 Jupiters.

Light from a distant quasar, the bright core of a galaxy, passes by a massive galaxy and bends, like a flashlight beam through uneven glass. If the lens and source align almost perfectly, we see not one quasar but several copies.

A giant magnifying glass made of gravity zoomed in on a distant galaxy, and astronomers got a peek into its chemical kitchen.

For nearly a century, astronomers have been searching for dark matter — an invisible scaffold that keeps galaxies from flying apart. Fritz Zwicky first proposed it, and Vera Rubin proved its existence by showing that stars on the outskirts of galaxies move too fast.

Like a river that suddenly disappears underground, the Perseus Arm in the Milky Way breaks off in a region astronomers call the Giraffe Bay. Where the bright band of stars should continue, a dark 'void' is visible.

The Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are like two vast flocks of birds drawing together in the celestial expanse. New data from the Gaia telescope shows: Andromeda barely deviates sideways. The chance of their merger is a whopping 90%. Even the gentlest crosswind could steer their paths apart, but calculations say: it’s almost nonexistent.

In galaxy clusters, invisible dark matter serves as the framework holding star systems together. Its shape is betrayed by a faint glow — stars ripped from galaxies by tidal forces. This stellar 'broth' fills the cluster like a liquid taking the shape of its container: it envelops the clumps of dark matter, creating a precise cast of their outlines.

In the very center of the Milky Way, hidden behind a thick veil of dust, lies a giant accumulation of gas — the Central Molecular Zone. You can't see it with the naked eye: dust absorbs visible light, much like dense fog hides the lights of a city.

Light from distant stars, as it travels through cosmic dust, loses some of its energy. Dust grains absorb and scatter light, and the way they do so at different wavelengths reveals their composition and size. Astronomers call this the dust extinction curve.

In the Norma cluster, the nearest rich galaxy cluster to us, astronomers have spotted a shock wave. It arose when one cluster plowed into another, like the bow wave of a ship cutting through water. This wave compressed and heated the gas between the galaxies. Two galaxies sit right behind the wave front.

In the southern sky, the star Acrux shines brightly — the lowest point of the Southern Cross constellation. It is not a single star but a whole family. New observations revealed that it contains not five, but seven stars bound by gravity, like children holding hands in a circle dance.

A distant galaxy, similar to our Milky Way, is blowing gas into space like a hair dryer blowing dust off a table. Seven beams of light from an even more distant object pierced this gas cloud, and astronomers saw that the gas flow is narrow, like a jet from a hose, not wide like a fan.

The Universe looks like a giant spiderweb: galaxies aren't scattered randomly but are gathered into knots and along filaments. Inside the filaments, there's plenty of gas, and that's where new stars most often flare up. But how has this changed over time? Scientists compared data from a computer model with real observations of thousands of galaxies.

Blue giant stars are usually born in tight stellar nurseries — open clusters within the thin disk of our Galaxy. But sometimes such stars are found high above the disk, as if thrown out of their home. How did they get there?

Galaxies, like giant whirlpools, sometimes collide and merge. In this chaos, gas compresses, new stars flare up, and a bright radio beacon is born at the very center. Its light — not visible to the eye, but radio waves — pierces through dust and gas like a siren through fog.