Large galaxies like the Milky Way do not roam the cosmos alone. Instead, they are surrounded by many smaller companion galaxies. The largest satellite of the Milky Way is called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and it should be big enough to have its own satellites – but these satellites don’t seem to be there.
Although once invisible to us in the vast reaches of the universe, 39 massive ancient galaxies have been discovered by astronomers using multiple space and ground-based observatories. This is the first discovery of its kind, the researchers said.
Astronomers have created the most precise map to date of the Milky Way by tracking thousands of big pulsating stars spread throughout the galaxy, demonstrating that its disk of myriad stars is not flat but dramatically warped and twisted in shape.
The Milky Way, home to our sun and billions of other stars, merged with another smaller galaxy in a colossal cosmic collision roughly 10 billion years ago, scientists said on Monday based on data from the Gaia space observatory.
Source: Live Science The vast voids between galaxies can stretch millions of light-years across and may appear empty. But these spaces actually contain more matter than the galaxies themselves. “If you took a cubic meter, there would be less than one atom in it,” Michael Shull, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder, told
Scientists predicted that our universe’s structure resembles a huge web. We’ve finally seen one of the strands.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a by-product of the galaxies releasing incredibly high amounts of ionising radiation. The finding offers clues to the cause of the Epoch of Reionisation, a major cosmic event that transformed the universe from being mostly opaque to the brilliant starscape seen today. The new work appears in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 2018, a team of astronomers from the United States and Canada discovered that an ultra-diffuse galaxy called NGC 1052-DF2 (DF2 for short) contains virtually no dark matter. The galaxy is roughly the size of our Milky Way Galaxy, but hosts only 1/200 the number of stars. It lies in the constellation of Cetus, about 65 million light-years away, and is a member of the NGC 1052 group of galaxies. Now, the team reports the discovery of a second galaxy in this class, residing in the same group.
Scientists in Australia and China create 3D map revealing the true shape of the galaxy
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away. The finding is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
