A powerful collision of galaxy clusters has been captured with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. Like its famous cousin, the so-called Bullet Cluster, this clash of…

How do galaxies form? The most widely accepted answer to this fundamental question is the model of 'hierarchical formation', a step-wise process in which small galaxies merge to build larger ones.…

The systematics of celestial bodies needs to be revised, say researchers at the Argelander Institute of Astronomy of the University of Bonn. Brown dwarfs, to-date merely regarded as stars which were…

The mystery of how young stars can form within the deep gravity of black holes has been solved by a team of astrophysicists at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh. The team, partly funded by…

NGC 1275 is one of the closest giant elliptical galaxies and lies at the centre of the Perseus Cluster of galaxies. It is an active galaxy, hosting a supermassive black hole at its core, which blows…

Unlike many astronomical phenomena, meteors are best seen with the unaided eye rather than through a telescope or binoculars and are perfectly safe to watch, so be prepared to sleep outside on August…

We don't have spacecraft to take us outside our solar system but astronomers have still been able to develop a good understanding of how our solar system formed and in turn, how others formed. In the…

Nihilist types, and even prevailing theoretical models, attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way but a new study by Northwestern University…

When Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and colleagues at Oxford University enlisted public support in cataloguing galaxies, they never envisioned the strange object Hanny van Arkel found in…

Globular star clusters, dense bunches of hundreds of thousands of stars, contain some of the oldest surviving stars in the Universe. A new international study of globular clusters outside our Milky…