BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Stars and galaxies

Here is a massive young galaxy cluster called IDCS J1426.5+3508 (IDCS 1426 for short). The image is a combined one from three space observatories – the blue is X-ray from Chandra, visible light from Hubble is yellow-green, and red is infrared light detected by Spitzer. The cluster is some 10 billion light years from Earth with a mass equal to nearly 500 trillion Suns.

A mosaic image of the starburst galaxy Messier 82. A starburst galaxy is one with a high rate of new star formation. In M82's central regions young stars are being born 10 times faster than in our Milky Way. The webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen are coming from the region of stellar nurseries.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI) and P. Puxley (NSF).

The Milky Way is headed at two million kilometers per hour towards who-knows-what? The mystery area that's pulling our galaxy and many others had been dubbed the Great Attractor, but what is it and exactly where is it?

A group of researchers in Australia haven't quite solved the forty-year-old mystery, but it looks as though the mystery may be unraveling. Using the Parkes radio telescope, they've discovered hundreds of galaxies hidden from view beyond the Milky Way. However their presence has been detected using the radio telescope. There are massive clusters and superclusters whose mass must be influencing our galaxy.

If you saw the delightful Australian film The Dish, you may recognize the Parkes radio telescope, which was "the dish".

British astronaut Tim Peake, on board the International Space Station, took a picture of Dark Clouds of Gas in the Milky Way. I can see the dusty clouds, but - wow! - what I mostly see are stars, stars, stars. How beautiful.

I've seen (and posted) pictures of starburst galaxies before. They're galaxies with an exceptionally high rate of star formation going on. But I don't think I've seen anything like this one - a jewelled hook known as J082354.96 to its close friends.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Hayes

Most galaxies are classified as either spiral or elliptical, but there are also some irregular ones which have no defined shape. Here is an example - this Hubble Space Telescope picture of NGC 5408 is gorgeous, but you won't see any shape to it.

Meet the beautiful barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365, about 60 million light years away from us in the constellation Fornax. It's the dominant member of the Fornax galaxy cluster. The image shows


Image Credit & Copyright: Dietmar Hager, Eric Benson, Torsten Grossmann