Aided by a trick of gravity, astronomers have found a normal galaxy. Big deal, right? The thing is, where they found it is not normal: The light we see from it left the galaxy 12.4 billion years ago, meaning we’re seeing it as it was when the Universe itself was only 1.4 billion years old! That’s what makes this so weird. A normal galaxy has no business being there when the cosmos was so young. But yet, there it sits.

Scientists have spotted an active galaxy far, far away — and it looks like it could join Darth Vader's fleet. Located 500 million light-years away in the Cassiopeia constellation, Galaxy TXS 0128+554 bears a striking resemblance to the iconic aircraft from Star Wars. According to a paper published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal, the galaxy is active, meaning all of its stars are not capable of providing the amount of light emitted by the galaxy on their own.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has released some stunning and phenomenal images of the universe — galaxies, supernova remnants, stars, planetary nebulas processed by its ‘Chandra X-Ray Observatory’ — the world’s most powerful x-ray telescope.

Astronomers have determined the cause of the dramatic dimming observed last year and earlier this year of one of the brightest stars in the night sky, a colossus called Betelgeuse that appears to be on its way toward a violent death. Based on Hubble Space Telescope observations, scientists said they believe Betelgeuse ejected a huge hot, dense cloud of material into space that cooled to form dust, shielding the star’s light and making it appear dimmer from the perspective of viewers on Earth.

It’s been about a year since the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released the first image of a black hole. That groundbreaking snapshot featured the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a massive elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. Now, the EHT Collaboration has released a new image, which shows a jet shooting from the nearly 1-billion-solar-mass black hole 3C 279, located about 5 billion light-years away. The results associated with the image were published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The scientists behind the first picture of a black hole are squeezing everything they can from the data they’ve got. A year after presenting a portrait of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 (SN: 4/10/19), the Event Horizon Telescope team faces a two-year data drought, thanks to technical snafus, security snags and a global pandemic.

The first sign that Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity was correct has made a repeat appearance, this time near a supermassive black hole. In 1915, Einstein realized that his newly formulated general theory of relativity explained a weird quirk in the orbit of Mercury. Now, that same effect has been found in a star’s orbit of the enormous black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, researchers with the GRAVITY collaboration report April 16 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A newly discovered black hole is closer than any other to Earth, scientists say. It is so nearby that the stars that swirl around it can be see with the naked eye, they write in a new study.And the object could be just the "tip of the iceberg" with many other similar black holes being hidden and waiting to be found, the astronomers say.

3.5 billion light years from Earth — a significant chunk of the way across the visible Universe — lies a monster. It's called OJ287, and it's an active galaxy, one with a tremendous amount of energy blasting out of its nucleus. It's classified as a blazar, one of the most luminous objects in the Universe, with energy pouring out of it across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves all the way up to high-energy gamma rays.

The oldest disk-shaped galaxy ever spotted formed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, a new study finds. That’s much earlier than astronomers thought that this type of galaxy could form. Previous observations show that disk-shaped galaxies — including sprawling, spiral systems like the Milky Way — didn’t show up in large numbers until between 3 billion and 4 billion years after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.

At long last, all of the universe’s ordinary matter seems to be present and accounted for. Astronomers have taken a new census of matter in the universe by examining how bright flashes of radio waves from other galaxies, called fast radio bursts, are distorted by particles on their way to Earth. This analysis shows that about half of the universe’s ordinary matter, which has eluded detection for decades, is lurking in intergalactic space, researchers report online May 27 in Nature.

A black hole about 390 million light-years away has caused the biggest eruption ever seen in the universe. The supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy located in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Its eruption was about five times greater than the last record-holder.

In spite of their dark reputations, two black holes may have set off a cosmic light show. Subtle gravitational rumbles from a collision of two black holes may have been accompanied by a flare of light about a month later, physicists report June 25 in Physical Review Letters. It’s a surprising conclusion given black holes’ propensity to swallow up light and matter. “The normal expectation has been they just merge and all you would detect is gravitational waves,” says astrophysicist Matthew Graham of Caltech.

An unusually bright star in a nearby galaxy has gone missing, in a mystery of cosmic proportions. An object inside the Kinman dwarf galaxy has disappeared from view, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This massive and exceptionally bright blue star was hypothesized to exist based on astronomical observations made between 2001 and 2011, but as of 2019, it is no longer detectable.

On March 12th 2020 a space telescope called Swift detected a burst of radiation from halfway across the Milky Way. Within a week, the newly discovered X-ray source, named Swift J1818.0–1607, was found to be a magnetar, a rare type of slowly rotating neutron star with one of the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe.

The Universe isn't just a random scattering of galaxies sprinkled throughout an expanding void. The closer we look, the more we see that there are structures - some of which are incomprehensibly vast groupings and clusters of galaxies that are gravit

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released today a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in our possible exploration of its history.

In 1969, the American astronomer Vera Rubin puzzled over her observations of the sprawling Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s biggest neighbour. As she mapped out the rotating spiral arms of stars through spectra carefully measured at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Lowell Observatory, both in Arizona, she noticed something strange: the stars in the galaxy’s outskirts seemed to be orbiting far too fast. So fast that she’d expect them to escape Andromeda and fling out into the heavens beyond. Yet the whirling stars stayed in place.

ESA’s Integral helps unravel origin of Fast Radio BurstsA global collaboration of telescopes including ESA’s Integral high-energy space observatory has detected a unique mix of radiation bursting from a dead star in our galaxy — something that has never been seen before in this type of star, and may solve a long-standing cosmic mystery. 

Thirty thousand years ago, a dead star on the other side of the Milky Way belched out a powerful mixture of radio and X-ray energy. On April 28, 2020, that belch swept over Earth, triggering alarms at observatories around the world. The signal was there and gone in half a second, but that's all scientists needed to confirm they had detected something remarkable: the first ever "fast radio burst" (FRB) to emanate from a known star within the Milky Way, according to a study published July 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.