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The Hubble Telescope snapped the object named Arp 282, which is an interacting galaxy pair composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 & the galaxy IC 1559. In ESA's own words, this incredible three-dimensional-looking picture by Hubble shows two galaxies interacting with each other as if engaging in a 'cosmic draw'. The interaction captured by the telescope is considered significant as astronomers believe that the interaction of galaxies with one another is an important aspect of their evolution. According to ESA, the object seen in the picture is named Arp 282, which is an interacting galaxy pair composed of the...

What a Perfect Gravitational LensA stunning new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a nearly perfect Einstein Ring, an effect caused by gravitational lensing. This is one of the most complete Einstein Rings ever seen. Gravitational lenses occur when a massive object, such as a galaxy, is aligned directly between Earth and another massive object even farther away. Einstein predicted that gravity could bend light, and this image is a wonderful example of how gravity from foreground objects causes a deflection of light from background objects, forming a ring of light.In this case, it’s not just one foreground...

Explanation: Is that one galaxy or three? Toward the right of the featured Hubble image of the massive galaxy cluster Abell 3827 is what appears to be a most unusual galaxy -- curved and with three centers. A detailed analysis, however, finds that these are three images of the same background galaxy -- and that there are at least four more images. Light we see from the single background blue galaxy takes multiple paths through the complex gravity of the cluster, just like a single distant light can take multiple paths through the stem of a wine glass. Studying how...

Explanation: What does the Andromeda galaxy look like in ultraviolet light? Young blue stars circling the galactic center dominate. A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, really is just next door as large galaxies go. Spanning about 230,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light in 2003. While its spiral arms stand out in visible light images, Andromeda's arms look more like rings in ultraviolet. The rings are sites of intense star formation and...

Care to take a 360-degree look at what appear to be Samsung's latest foldable phones, smartwatches and earbuds? Well-known Twitter tipster Evan Blass is happy to oblige. Blass, whose Twitter handle is @evleaks, served up some delicious animated GIFs for Samsung fans Friday night, along with the simple note "#GalaxyUnpacked 11 August 2021." That would suggest, of course, that Samsung plans to tout the featured gadgets at an Unpacked event next month. The event would follow Unpacked shindigs that went down in April, March and January. The snarfable GIFs posted by Blass appear to show the rumored Galaxy Z Fold...

“A Perilous Journey” –Our Solar System Has Completed 20 Orbits of the Milky Way Posted on Jun 26, 2021 in Astronomy, Milky Way Galaxy, Science In 1999 astronomers focusing on a star at the center of the Milky Way, measured precisely how long it takes the sun to complete one orbit (a galactic year) of our home galaxy: 226 million years, bobbing our fraught journey through the disc of the Milky Way, drifting through ghostly spiral arms and the darkness of dense nebulae, keeping a constant 30,000 light years between Earth and the violent galactic core. The last time the...

Explanation: Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is some 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter. It's the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core...

The best example is represented by the Sunflower galaxy (Messier 63 / NGC 5055) with the strongest external field among SPARC galaxies, whose well-measured rotation curve shows a mildly declining behavior at large radial distance and can be accurately modeled only with an external field effect. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA ================================================================= Team of international collaborators detect ‘external field effect,’ a prediction unique to MOND, rival dark matter hypothesis. An international group of scientists, including Case Western Reserve University Astronomy Chair Stacy McGaugh, has published research contending that a rival idea to the popular dark matter hypothesis more accurately predicts a...

At the center of the our galaxy, with a mass roughly 4 millions times that of our sun, is a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*. And great news! It turns out scientists have discovered that we're 2,000 light-years closer to this gigantic black hole than we thought. This doesn't mean we're currently on a collision course with a black hole. No, it's simply the result of a more accurate model of the Milky Way based on new data. Over the last 15 years, a Japanese radio astronomy project, VERA, has been gathering data. Using a technique called interferometry, VERA...

Image and amplification (in color) of the ultra-diffuse galaxy Dragonfly 44 taken with the Hubble space telescope. Credit: Teymoor Saifollahi and NASA/HST. ============================================================================= At present, the formation of galaxies is difficult to understand without the presence of a ubiquitous, but mysterious component, termed dark matter. Astronomers have measure how much dark matter there is around galaxies, and have found that it varies between 10 and 300 times the quantity of visible matter. However, a few years ago, the discovery of a very diffuse object, named Dragonfly 44, changed this view. It was found that this galaxy has 10,000 times more...

The spiral pattern shown by the galaxy in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is striking because of its delicate, feathery nature. These “flocculent” spiral arms indicate that the recent history of star formation of the galaxy, known as NGC 2775, has been relatively quiet. There is virtually no star formation in the central part of the galaxy, which is dominated by an unusually large and relatively empty galactic bulge, where all the gas was converted into stars long ago. NGC 2275 is classified as a flocculent spiral galaxy, located 67 million light-years away in the constellation of...

Three supermassive black holes found lurking in one galaxy NGC 6240 is a well-studied example of a galaxy merger. But the discovery that it hides three supermassive black holes makes it a stunning example of a galaxy formed through a triple merger. By Alison Klesman  |  Published: Friday, November 22, 2019 RELATED TOPICS: BLACK HOLES | GALAXIES The strange galaxy NGC 6240 is an ultra-rare example of a galaxy harboring three supermassive black holes near its core. Astronomers already knew of the galaxy's active, northern black hole (N), but thanks to cutting-edge 3D-mapping techniques, they've now identified two more —...

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don't yet understand why. "We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole," said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. "It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don't know what is driving this big feast." A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in...

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with curved arms stretching out into space. Most depictions of our galaxy show it as being rather flat, but data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment at the university suggests the opposite. The team, who describe our galaxy as being less a flat disc and more a “wobbly, uncooked pizza crust,” mapped the position of a specific type of star called Cepheids. Cepheids are pulsating stars and it’s easy for researchers to measure the distance between them and Earth. Using data from 2,431 Cepheids, the team was able to create its incredibly detailed...

Our Milky Way galaxy is part of a group of galaxies called the Local Group. The Local Group is dominated by the Milky Way and its larger sibling, the Andromeda Galaxy. The many dwarf galaxies clinging gravitationally to the Milky Way and Andromeda round out the Local Group's population. The Local Group itself is part of an even larger structure, called the Laniakea Super-Cluster, which contains over 100,000 galaxies. Local Group and nearest galaxies. (Wikipedia Commons/Antonio Ciccolella) The new study is titled "Cosmicflows-3: Cosmography of the Local Void." Cosmicflows-3 is a compendium of over 17,000 galaxy distances in our cosmic...

NEW YORK/SEOUL – Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it has received “a few” reports of damage to the displays of samples of its upcoming foldable smartphone, raising the prospect of a less-then-smooth entry for the splashy $1,980 handset. The Galaxy Fold, on sale from April 26 in the United States, resembles a conventional smartphone but opens like a book to reveal a second display the size of a small tablet at 7.3 inches (18.5 cm). The design, matched by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd’s Mate X, was hailed as the future in a field that has seen few surprises since Apple...

The Universe is so enormous we can't really comprehend it all. I try my best to visualize it in this video. This video had without a doubt the most complicated math I've ever done in a video before. If I made errors or miscalculations please let me know in the comments or message me! I want to know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7NzjCmUf0&feature=youtu.be

Located in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away, NGC 6052 is a pair of colliding galaxies. They were first discovered in 1784 by William Herschel and were originally classified as a single irregular galaxy because of their odd shape. However, we now know that NGC 6052 actually consists of two galaxies that are in the process of colliding. This particular image of NGC 6052 was taken using the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. A long time ago gravity drew the two galaxies together into the chaotic state we now observe. Stars from...

About $1,600. That's how much it will cost you to have a Note 9 with 1TB of storage. Samsung's new Galaxy Note 9 comes in two configurations -- a 128GB model with 6GB of RAM for $999.99, and a 512GB model with 8GB of RAM for... wait for it... $1,249.99. Now that 512GB model already offers twice as much storage capacity as the higher-end iPhone X (and much more RAM, for only $100 extra). But where's the fun in only having half a terabyte of storage? That only allows you to store about 2,300 movies, or some 93,000 photos. We...

Aa Astronomers are celebrating a massive data release that offers them the richest ever map of the Milky Way. The information comes from ESA's GAIA space telescope, which has surveyed almost two billion stars in our galaxy. They now have very precise data on billions of stars around our galaxy that will make for decades of analysis. It gives them the possibility to research the history of our galaxy and postulate what might happen in the future, too.Astronomer François Mignard was one of the founding fathers of the GAIA mission. So why does this data release make such a difference...