galaxies

Colossal ‘Fossil’ Structures Have Been Detected Lurking on The Outskirts of Our Galaxy

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From Earth’s vantage point in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct. That’s because gauging the distance to something in space when you don’t know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness … Read more

Supermassive black holes: Two nearby giants are heading for a collision

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Two supermassive black holes have been discovered just 1600 light years apart, and they are likely to collide in about 250 million years Space 30 November 2021 By Leah Crane The two bright spots in this image are dense groups of stars, each with a supermassive black hole at the centre ESO/Voggel et al. A … Read more

Scientists Observed This Ghostly Galaxy For 40 Hours And Couldn’t Find Any Dark Matter

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A new discovery has deepened the mystery of galaxies without dark matter. In a galaxy named AGC 114905, 250 million light-years away, astronomers could find no trace of the mysterious stuff, even after 40 hours of detailed observation and subsequent analysis.   The result, to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical … Read more

NASA Launches IXPE, a New X-ray Space Telescope

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SpaceX successfully launched its 28th rocket of the year early Thursday morning (Dec. 9), ferrying an X-ray observatory into space for NASA. A used Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 1 a.m. (0600 GMT) from Pad 39A here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). The mission marked the fifth … Read more