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galaxies

This composite image of X-rays from Chandra (colored light blue) and optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (yellow, red, white, and blue) shows a beautiful new look at the compact group of galaxies known as Stephan???s Quintet. One galaxy is thought to be passing through the others at almost two million miles per hour. This generates a shock wave that heats the gas and creates the ridge of X-ray emission detected by Chandra.

Space

Milky Way shakes: The cosmic collisions that made our galaxy

Intricate patterns in the movements of millions of stars are revealing the history of our home galaxy in rich detail – and could even pinpoint the events that gave birth to our sun

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Close-up view of the two bright galactic nuclei, each housing a supermassive black hole, in NGC 7727, a galaxy located 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Each nucleus consists of a dense group of stars with a supermassive black hole at its centre. The two black holes are on a collision course and form the closest pair of supermassive black holes found to date. It is also the pair with the smallest separation between two supermassive black holes ??? observed just 1600 light-years apart in the sky.???? The image was taken with the MUSE instrument on ESO???s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Space

A pair of nearby supermassive black holes are heading for a collision

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Milky way galaxy

Space

A strange barrier is keeping cosmic rays out of the Milky Way’s centre

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The Large Magellanic Cloud

Space

The history of the Large Magellanic Cloud has been mapped in detail

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Illustration of our galaxy, the Milky Way seen obliquely, with the arms and the central bar in their approximate known locations. There are four major arms and one arm fragment (Orion-Cygnus or Local) where the Sun is found. In the annotated version of this image, the yellow dot indicates the position of the Solar System about 25000 ly from the galactic core. The Norma and Outer arms are in fact the same, but the two names refer to different parts of it. The same is true of the so-called 3kpc (3 kilo-parsec) arm, which further out becomes the Perseus arm.

Space

Astronomers may have spotted a new spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy

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We finally know when the first stars in the universe switched on

Space

We finally know when the first stars in the universe switched on

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galactic filament

Space

Enormous strands of galaxies in the cosmic web appear to be spinning

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spiral galaxy

Space

Dark matter is slowing down the slab of stars at our galaxy’s centre

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Wind from supermassive black holes may help small galaxies thrive

Space

Wind from supermassive black holes may help small galaxies thrive

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Infrared view of the centre of the Milky Way

Space

The building blocks for life might exist at the edge of the galaxy

Astronomers have found molecules that could be the building blocks of life in the far reaches of our galaxy, which may broaden the horizons of the search for extraterrestrial life

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Space

Cosmic smash-ups may push huge black holes away from their homes

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Space

Star cluster lurking in the shadows may help explain galactic mystery

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Space

Young galaxies grow up faster than astronomers previously thought

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Space

Rare images show role of collisions in galactic evolution

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