A team of Dutch and German astronomers have discovered part of the missing matter in the Universe using the European X-ray satellite XMM-Newton. They observed a filament of hot gas connecting two clusters of galaxies. This tenuous hot gas could be part of the missing “baryonic” matter. Their findings are being published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A team of astronomers looking at the universe’s distant past found nine young, unusually compact galaxies, each weighing in at 200 billion times the mass of the Sun. The findings appeared in the April 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Galaxy collisions produce a remarkable variety of intricate structures, as 59 new images from the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope show.

Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies.

The story has rather a commonplace beginning. British radio astronomer Antony Hewish – who was already well-known in the 1960s – asked his postgraduate Jocelyn Bell to make her own telescope to explore the sky and search for new quasars. With the help of her colleagues she coiled kilometers of wire around hundreds of wooden poles. Thus, she created a very sensitive aerial that subsequently began to receive strange signals on a regular basis.

XMM-Newton has been surprised by a rare type of galaxy, from which it has detected a higher number of X-rays than thought possible. The observation gives new insight into the powerful processes shaping galaxies during their formation and evolution.

UK astronomers have developed the most sensitive infrared map of the distant universe ever produced, revealing the origins of the most massive galaxies in the cosmos.

The strongest burst of star formation occurred two billion years after the Big Bang according to new research led by a Cambridge academic.

A half-mile down in an old iron ore mine in Minnesota, incredibly sensitive detectors have been waiting for a particle of dark matter, an invisible substance that may form the skeleton of galaxies, to make itself known.

Combining 39 individual frames taken over 11 hours of exposure time, NASA astronomers have created this ultraviolet mosaic of the nearby "Triangulum Galaxy."

The galaxy has much in store and it shares its secrets with us step by step. This time is not an exception.

Scaled versions of Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star 5000 light-years away, half as massive as the Sun, have been revealed from an effort involving a world-wide net of telescopes, including the UK's Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Islands.