A recently detected flash of energy appears to have emanated from the wreckage of colliding galaxies, according to an international team of astronomers led by Penn State scientists. The burst, known ...

Billions of light years away in a remote part of the universe, two neutron stars – the ultradense remnants of dead stars – collided. The catastropic cosmic event sent light and particles, including a ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Last month when scientists announced new ...

Understanding how galaxies grow has long stood as one of astronomy’s core challenges. Over time, scientists have gathered evidence that galaxy mergers matter. When two galaxies move close, gravity can ...

A recently detected flash of energy appears to have emanated from the wreckage of colliding galaxies, according to an ...

Examples of merging galaxies containing a heavily obscured growing supermassive black hole observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The top panels show nearby galaxies at ~500 million light-years from ...

Astronomers have detected a neutron star collision in an unexpected place, deep within a tiny, faint galaxy. Located about ...

New data confirm that the titanic collisions of galaxies ignite the most powerful active galactic nuclei. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are phases in which supermassive black holes at the centre of ...

It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers reported Monday that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is ...

For the first time, astronomers have been able to combine the deepest optical images of the universe, obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, with equally sharp images in the near-infrared part of the ...

What happens when two rare ring galaxies collide? They form an infinity symbol—or the face of a cosmic owl, depending on how you look at it. The James Webb Space Telescope has helped two international ...

Astronomers have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center ...