At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe.
Read moreGas blown out of the Milky Way disk from exploding stars falls back onto the galaxy to form new generations of stars. In an effort to account for this recycling process, astronomers were surprised to find a surplus of incoming gas.
Read moreHow do some neutron stars become the strongest magnets in the Universe? Astrophysicists have found a possible answer to the question of how these so-called magnetars form. Researchers have used large computer simulations to demonstrate how the merger of two stars creates strong magnetic fields. If such stars explode in supernovae, magnetars could result.
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This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos," with one half to James Peebles "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology" and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star."
Based on direct observations researchers have discovered massive filaments between galaxies in a proto-cluster, extending over more than 1 million parsecs and providing the fuel for intense formation of stars and the growth of super massive black holes within the proto-cluster.
Read moreAstronomers have pieced together the cannibalistic past of our neighboring large galaxy Andromeda, which has now set its sights on the Milky Way as its next main course.
Read moreThe 'special relationship' between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their hosts — something astronomers and physicists have observed for quite a while — can now be understood as a bond that begins early in a galaxy's formation and has a say in how both the galaxy and the SMBH at its center grow over time, according to a new study.
Read moreAstronomers have discovered a collection of 12 galaxies which existed about 13.0 billion years ago. One of the 12 galaxies is a giant object, known as Himiko, which was named for a mythological queen in ancient Japan. This discovery suggests that large structures such as protoclusters already existed when the Universe was only about 800 million years old, 6% of its present age.
Read moreAn experiment shows that one of the basic units of life — nucleobases — could have originated within giant gas clouds interspersed between the stars.
Read moreNew research by astrophysicists reveals how the gas and energy expelled by stars are returned to the universe, and in what forms. It also found that the elements produced by dying stars are transferred through a process of fragmentation and recycled into new stars and planets.
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