By cleverly unraveling the workings of a natural cosmic lens, astronomers have gained a rare glimpse of the violent assembly of a young galaxy in the early Universe. Their new picture suggests that the galaxy has collided with another, feeding a supermassive black hole and triggering a tremendous burst of star formation.

By analyzing light from small, faint galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, UC Irvine scientists believe they have discovered the minimum mass for galaxies in the universe – 10 million times the mass of the sun.

Astronomers have caught multiple massive galaxies in the act of merging about 4 billion years ago. This discovery, made possible by combining the power of the best ground- and space-based telescopes, uniquely supports the favoured theory of how galaxies form.

In the thin, dry air of northern Chile's Atacama Desert, at an altitude of 16,500 feet, an amazing new telescope system is taking shape, on schedule to provide the world's astronomers with unprecedented views of the origins of stars, galaxies, and planets.

Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to measure the distribution and motions of thousands of galaxies in the distant Universe. This opens fascinating perspectives to better understand what drives the acceleration of the cosmic expansion and sheds new light on the mysterious dark energy that is thought to permeate the Universe.

A pair of galaxies, known collectively as Arp 87, is one of hundreds of interacting and merging galaxies known in our nearby Universe. Arp 87 was originally discovered and catalogued by astronomer Halton Arp in the 1970s. Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a compilation of astronomical photographs using the Palomar 200-inch Hale and the 48-inch Samuel Oschin telescopes.

Stars in galaxies are a bit similar to people: during the first phase of their existence they grow rapidly, after which a stellar birth control occurs in most galaxies.

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early Universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. Nine Lego-like “building block” galaxies initially detected by Hubble likely contributed to the construction of the Universe as we know it.

By the end of 2007, the assembly of the ESA’s Herschel far-infrared space observatory – the latest mission to study the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies – will be completed.

University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all

Panoramic images of the sky obtained at Palomar Observatory are a major part of "Sky in Google Earth," a new product released today by Google Inc. Sky in Google Earth contains images of the entire celestial sphere, showing hundreds of millions of stars, galaxies, and other cosmic wonders.

Astronomers, including UC Riverside's Gabriela Canalizo, have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai'i to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of an ongoing collision between two galaxies 300 million light-years away.