Science, Galaxy | featured news

Based on information from the GALEX program, astronomers have crowned spiral galaxy NGC 6872 the largest known galaxy in the universe.

Scientists have spent years hunting for Earth-like planets orbiting stars elsewhere in the galaxy. Now they have found one that's a relative stone's-throw away. The so-called exoplanet — a planet beyond our solar system — is circling Alpha Centauri B, just 4.37 light-years from Earth. A mere 3.7 million miles from the star's surface, it is far too hot to support life. But there's a chance that another planetary sibling may reside in the system's so-called habitable zone, where liquid water could exist, scientists say.

The eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) focuses on a small patch of the constellation Fornax, containing some 5,500 galaxies. The image was culled from 10 years of photos of the same region of space shown in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was last updated in 2009, based on data gathered in 2003 and 2004.

Scientists have located a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.

Some people seem born under an unlucky star. But some stars are equally unlucky themselves. Astronomers have spotted a star in another galaxy plunging toward a giant black hole and being ripped to shreds, sparking a flare so brilliant that observers detected it from a distance of 2.1 billion light-years.

Don’t get too close. Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of the violent quasars, almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies, that dominated the early years of the universe.

Scientists’ predictions of the formation and characteristics of dark matter are shaken by research into dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a swirling maw of raw power, measuring 50,000 light-years across. So why on earth do astronomers call it "fluffy"?

Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the ...

Scientists have discovered the first planet from another galaxy, sort of. While some 500 planets have been identified in other parts of our galaxy — the Milky Way— none has been reported in other galaxies.