Home

On:

Peering deep into the vast stellar halo that envelops our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered tantalizing evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that are a relic of cannibalism by our Milky Way.

Hubble was used to precisely measure, for the first time ever, the sideways motions of a small sample of stars located far from the galaxy’s center. Their unusual lateral motion is circumstantial evidence that the stars may be the remnants of a shredded galaxy that was gravitationally ripped apart by the Milky Way billions of years ago. These stars support the idea that the Milky Way grew, in part, through the accretion of smaller galaxies. read more

On:

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas, discovered in 1963, is moving at more than 150 miles per second per second and is about to collide with the Milky Way, leading to a huge process of star formation. But this doesn’t have anything to do with that dreaded Mayan prophecy: The cloud will collide with the Milky Way in less than 40 million years, condensing into tens of thousands of bright, massive stars that will explode as supernovas within a couple of million years.
read more

On:

Using its near-infrared vision to peer 9 billion years back in time, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered an extraordinary population of tiny, young galaxies that are brimming with star formation. Most of these galaxies are a hundred times less massive than the Milky Way, yet they churned out stars at a furious pace. However, it’s a mystery why these newly found dwarf galaxies were making batches of stars at such a high rate.
read more