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Photo mosaic of Andromeda galaxy and five regions of interest. A spiral galaxy spreads across the width. It’s tilted nearly edge-on to our line of sight, appearing as an extreme oval on its side. Its borders are jagged because the image is a mosaic of smaller, square images. The outer edges are blue, while the inner two-thirds are yellowish with a bright, central core. Dark, dusty clouds wrap around the outer half of the galaxy’s disk. At 10 o'clock, a smaller dwarf elliptical galaxy forms a fuzzy, yellow blob. There are about 200 million stars within the image. The background of space is black. There are what appears to be steps toward the bottom, mainly toward the middle, which indicates where no data were taken. Interesting regions: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy; background galaxies seen much farther away; (b) NGC 206, a concentration of bright blue stars; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad yellow stars.

NASA’s Hubble Traces Hidden History of Andromeda Galaxy

6 min read

In the years following the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way — the…

Article5 days ago
Ground-based image of the Andromeda Galaxy stretches from lower left to upper right. A white arrow points to the location of the Hubble observations. Above the galaxy are four boxes containing Hubble images of the variable star at different luminosities.

NASA Celebrates Edwin Hubble’s Discovery of a New Universe

7 min read

For humans, the most important star in the universe is our Sun. The second-most important star is nestled inside the Andromeda galaxy. Don’t go looking for it — the flickering star is 2.2 million light-years away, and is 1/100,000th the…

Article6 days ago
Six Webb images of little red dots are combined in a two-row mosaic. Each little red dot is centered within a square frame and lies against the black background of space. Each dot has a yellow-white circular core surrounded by a red, fuzzy ring. White text in the top left corner of each box lists the source’s name from the Webb surveys, and its redshift. From left to right, the top row reads CEERS 14448, z = 4.75; NGDEEP 4321, z = 8.92; and PRIMER-COS 10539, z = 7.48. The bottom row reads CEERS 20320, z = 5.27; JADES 9186, z = 4.99; and PRIMER-UDS 17818, z = 6.40.

Newfound Galaxy Class May Indicate Early Black Hole Growth, Webb Finds

6 min read

In December 2022, less than six months after commencing science operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope revealed something never seen before: numerous red objects that appear small on the sky, which scientists soon called “little red dots” (LRDs). Though these…

Article1 week ago