Space and astronomy news
An international team of astronomers have discovered a massive gas ball hurtling through a distant galaxy cluster. This ball of gas is traveling more than 750 km/second (466 miles/second) through galaxy cluster Abell 3266. The enormous speed and pressure has heated the gas up to the point that it blazes in the X-ray spectrum. The …
After examining more than 4,000 galaxies in a recent survey, astronomers have discovered that most large galaxies are filled with old stars, It was expected that these large galaxies would be regularly ingesting smaller galaxies, creating bursts of star formation. Instead, however, it’s the smaller, fainter galaxies which seem to have all the hot star formation. The large, red galaxies contain the bulk of the mass in the nearby Universe, but very little is understood about their formation or evolution.
Galaxies aren’t spread evenly throughout space. They exist in groups, clusters, and superclusters. Our own Milky Way galaxy exists in an impossibly vast structure called the Laniakea supercluster. Laniakea was defined in 2014, and it contains over 100,000 galaxies. Now a team of astronomers have discovered another immense feature beyond Laniakea, called the South Pole …