A “galaxy-killing” wind driven by cosmic mergers may explain why many massive galaxies in the early universe stopped forming stars far earlier than expected, according to new JWST and ALMA observations.

Above a certain threshold, galaxies stop growing , no matter how much raw material they have on hand. The question is: what flips the switch?

The Magellanic Clouds are a pair of dwarf galaxies passing the Milky Way probably for the first time, but as they move they have been interacting with each other for billions of years.

Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have completed their final inspection of a key element for the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: the primary mirror. This 7.9-foot (2.4-meter) mirror will collect and focus light from cosmic objects near and far, helping Roman capture stunning panoramas of space. “The Roman engineering […]

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities. But it’s hard […]

Astronomers say that they have identified 20 stars that may have grown up together in a dwarf galaxy named "Loki" that eventually became part of our Milky Way.

Look closely at this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and you’ll see galaxies of various shapes and sizes clustered together toward the center-left of the image. A few foreground stars shine brightly and are easily distinguished by the spikes that appear to extend outward from each star. These spikes, called diffraction spikes, are the […]

What's the truth behind this unusually tranquil city of galaxies?

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy’s full face, while red, blue, and orange light from distant galaxies shines through its diffuse outer […]

The Vela Supercluster, in our Milky Way's Zone of Avoidance, is competing gravitationally with other superclusters for the attention of local galaxies.

Early galaxies were star-forming machines, gobbling up gas and spitting out stars with a furious intensity. A new model helps explain why things were so different back then.

In this new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the center of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (the Air Pump). As a nearby spiral galaxy, this target offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the cycle of stellar birth and death, […]

The post Hubble Spots a Starry Spiral…

The Sombrero galaxy's name fits perfectly.

A new citizen science project invites the public to scan never-before-seen images from the Euclid Space Telescope in search of galaxies bending spacetime.

The Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy, stuns in this ambassador's picture.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team now is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027. “Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise, and private enterprise come together to take […]

The post NASA Targets Early September for…

Our universe is full of mysteries, but few are as perplexing as the dark, tiny galaxies that hover around larger ones like the Milky Way.

Scientists have used a synthetic universe to observe how the first galaxies evolved and grew. In fact, it is so close to the real thing that it's tricking some astronomers.

Hubble images never fail to amaze.

"The discovery of this exceptional object has allowed us to accurately study the nature of the stars at the center of an elliptical galaxy in a remote era of the universe, when the galaxy was still young."

A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral galaxy, […]

The post Hubble Spies an Active Spiral appeared first on NASA Science.

The Artemis II crew captured this photo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, on April 7, 2026. The Milky Way’s elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Spanning more than 100,000 light-years, Earth is located along one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, about […]

The post Starstruck appeared first on NASA Science.

NASA's XRISM X-ray spacecraft has clocked 2 million mph winds ripping out of a distant galaxy bursting with star formation.

Astronomers have spotted the most distant and brightest "space laser" ever seen, and it's blasting from a galaxy collision that occurred when the universe was half its current age.

For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the speed of superheated gas billowing from a cauldron of stellar activity at the heart of M82.

The post NASA-JAXA’s XRISM Telescope Clocks Hot Wind of Galaxy M82 appeared first on NASA Science.

Astronomers captured a colorful new portrait of the Triangulum Galaxy, revealing complex clouds of gas in between the galaxy's 40 billion stars.

What if the mysterious 'Little Red Dots' aren't baby black holes, but rather globular clusters in their messy, glorious formation?

The Hubble and Euclid space telescopes caught a stunning portrait of a dying star at the heart of the Cat's Eye Nebula.

The Milky Way nebula RCW 36 resembles a stunning cosmic bird of prey in an incredible Very Large Telescope image.

The galaxy NGC 941 was imaged by the Subaru Telescope at the summit of Maunakea, Hawai'i.