mergers

Astonishing Image Captures The Epic Collision of Three Galaxies

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An object 681 million light-years away might look like one glorious, exquisite mess, but there’s a lot more going on that a first glance indicates. The object showcased in a new Hubble image – called IC 2431 – is not one galaxy, but three, coming together in a massive galactic merger that will one day … Read more

The Milky Way’s Dramatic History of Violence Has Been Charted in a New Map

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Over the course of the history of the Universe, the Milky Way has not been serenely sailing through intergalactic space. Quite the contrary, actually. Over the last 13.6 billion years or so, it has collided with and consumed multiple other galaxies.   Now, through painstaking work, astronomers led by Khyati Malhan of the Max Planck … Read more

A New Study Calculates The Number of Black Holes in The Universe. It’s a Lot

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Because we can’t see black holes, it’s hard to know exactly how many are out there in the big, wide Universe. But that doesn’t mean we have no means of trying to figure it out. Stellar-mass black holes are the collapsed cores of dead massive stars, and new research incorporating how these stars and binaries … Read more