Category Astronomy/Space

Image of the gravitational lens RX J1131-1231 galaxy with the lens galaxy at the center and four lensed background quasars. It is estimated that there are trillions of planets in the center elliptical galaxy in this image. Credit: University of Oklahoma

A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team has discovered for the first time a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Using microlensing – an astronomical phenomenon and the only known method capable of discovering planets at truly great distances from the Earth among other detection techniques – OU researchers were able to detect objects in extragalactic galaxies that range from the mass of the Moon to the mass of Jupiter.

Xinyu Dai, professor in the Homer L...

Centaurus A, an elliptical galaxy 13 million light-years from Earth, hosts a group of dwarf satellite galaxies co-rotating in a narrow disk, a distribution not predicted by dark-matter-influenced cosmological models. Credit: Christian Wolf and the SkyMapper team / Australian National University

An international team has determined that Centaurus A, a massive elliptical galaxy 13 million light-years from Earth, is accompanied by a number of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting the main body in a narrow disk. This is the first time such a galactic arrangement has been observed outside the Local Group, home to the Milky Way...

Andromeda galaxy

CU Boulder researchers have discovered a mechanism that explains the persistence of asymmetrical stellar clusters surrounding supermassive black holes in some galaxies and suggests that during post-galactic merger periods, orbiting stars could be flung into the black hole and destroyed at a rate of one per year.

A supermassive black hole’s gravity creates a nuclear star cluster surrounding it, which gravitational physics would expect to be spherically symmetric. However, several galaxies – including nearby Andromeda – have been observed with an asymmetrical star cluster that takes the form of a disk instead. Eccentric disks are suspected to be formed in the wake of a recent merger between two gas-rich galaxies.

Within the disk, each star follows an elliptical orbit that re...

Lead author Fabian Schneider, a Hintze Research Fellow in the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics, said: “We were astonished when we realised that 30 Doradus has formed many more massive stars than expected.”

Astronomers have revealed an ‘astonishing’ overabundance of massive stars in a neighboring galaxy. The discovery, made in a gigantic star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, has ‘far-reaching’ consequences for our understanding of how stars transformed the pristine Universe into the one we live in today. As part of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS), the team used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to observe nearly 1,000 massive stars in 30 Doradus, a gigantic stellar nursery also known as the Tarantula Nebula...