At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe.
Read moreAstronomers have completed the largest survey to date of the faint outskirts of nearby galaxies, successfully testing a low-cost system for exploring these local stellar systems. The team find that the diameters of the galactic outskirts — the haloes — appear to correlate with the brightness and type of galaxy.
Read moreAstronomers have used a massive cluster of galaxies as an X-ray magnifying glass to peer back in time, to nearly 9.4 billion years ago. In the process, they spotted a tiny dwarf galaxy in its very first, high-energy stages of star formation.
Read moreAstronomers have discovered that powerful winds driven by supermassive black holes in the centers of dwarf galaxies have a significant impact on the evolution of these galaxies by suppressing star formation.
Read moreGas blown out of the Milky Way disk from exploding stars falls back onto the galaxy to form new generations of stars. In an effort to account for this recycling process, astronomers were surprised to find a surplus of incoming gas.
Read moreA team of astronomers has discovered that several of the small — or 'dwarf' — galaxies orbiting the Milky Way were likely stolen from the Large Magellanic Cloud, including several ultrafaint dwarfs, but also relatively bright and well-known satellite galaxies, such as Carina and Fornax.
Read moreResearchers have constructed a framework for starting and raising a fusion plasma to temperatures rivaling the sun in hundreds of milliseconds.
Read moreHow do some neutron stars become the strongest magnets in the Universe? Astrophysicists have found a possible answer to the question of how these so-called magnetars form. Researchers have used large computer simulations to demonstrate how the merger of two stars creates strong magnetic fields. If such stars explode in supernovae, magnetars could result.
Read morePhysicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute for Physics have turned to plasmas in a proposal that could revolutionise the search for the elusive dark matter.
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This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos," with one half to James Peebles "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology" and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star."