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It's a unique discovery in M31 the Andromeda Galaxy. (Image: NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer in UV)

Usually stars are born in clusters and they tend to keep on moving together. But sometimes one makes a run for it. Two astronomers have discovered the first runaway red supergiant ever identified in another galaxy. It’s also the fastest runaway massive star known.

We might wonder whether this fast-moving star will make a complete getaway and escape the galaxy, but that won't happen. It's nearing the end of its days and the million or so years left to it won't be long enough to get out of M31. The star will go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion.

One of the winners in the 2015 David Malin awards for amateur astrophotography. It's called South Along Bucklands Lane and it was taken by Phil Hart.

Malin, a distinguished astrophotographer, commented, "A crescent moon illuminates the foreground and high cloud accentuates the colours of the bright stars in the Southern Cross. A beautifully composed night-time landscape with excellent star colours and clear definition of the Magellanic Clouds, the nearest galaxies."

The Leo Triplet is three galaxies visible in the same field of view in the constellation Leo the Lion. (Image Credit: ESO, INAF-VST, OmegaCAM)

NGC 3628 (left), M66 (bottom right), & M65 (top right), are all large spiral galaxies. Their disks are tilted at different angles to us, so they look different. NGC 3628 is edge-on, while the disks of M66 & M65 are inclined enough to show off their spiral structure. The view covers over 500 thousand light-years.

Here is M63, also known as the Sunflower Galaxy because the spiral arms are reminiscent of the pattern at the center of a sunflower. The arms in this galaxy are brightened by the presence of young luminous stars.

The galaxy was discovered by French astronomer Pierre Mechain in 1779. It's located about 27 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), and is part of the M51 Group of galaxies.

(Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

Our galaxy the Milky Way is going to collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. Nothing for you to worry about however, it won't happen for a few billion years. Here is a simulation of the encounter. There is a little bit in German at the beginning. The Milchstrasse is the Milky Way. And each second in the video represents a million years. It's mesmerising.

Here's an unusual galaxy. It's the Lindsay-Shapley ring galaxy, AM 0644-741 in the constellation Volans. (Volans is the flying fish.) The ring probably formed in a collision between two galaxies. The shock wave set off a burst of star formation, creating the ring of young hot blue stars. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))

A galaxy called CGCG254-021 has been plowing through hot gas in the galaxy cluster Zwicky 8338 which is about 700 million light years from us. A ribbon of hot gas is trailing behind the galaxy like a tail – a tail is at least a quarter of a million light years long. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected the hot gas in X-rays; this shows up blue in the composite image. It's been combined with visible light data, which is yellow in the image, taken from the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in Spain's Canary Islands.

NGC 6052 is located around 230 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Two separate galaxies have been pulled together by gravity and are now merging into a single structure.
During the merging process individual stars are thrown out of their original orbits into entirely new ones, some very distant. Since the stars produce the light we see, the forming galaxy seems to have a highly chaotic shape. But eventually, this new galaxy will settle down into a stable shape.

(Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

On this day (December 29) in 1888, Welsh businessman and pioneer of astrophotography Isaac Roberts took the first detailed photograph of the Andromeda Nebula, also known as M31 and today recognized as the Andromeda Galaxy. In 1888 it was still generally assumed by most people that the Milky Way was the whole Universe, and that features such as M31 were objects in our own galaxy.

Seyfert's Sextet is a group of galaxies in the head of the constellation Serpens (the Snake).

However there are actually only four galaxies interacting in this group. The small face-on spiral galaxy is a long way into the background. In the upper left, the object isn't a galaxy, but the stars flung out as the galaxies interact.

They're very tightly packed together. The four galaxies occupy a space about the size of the Milky Way. Their gravitational pulls on each other are pulling them out of shape. One day they might all come together into one galaxy.

Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA;