One Star Potentially Formed in Planet-like Fashion Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that two young stars forming from the same swirling protoplanetary disk may be twins — in the sense that they came from the same parent cloud of star-forming material. Beyond that, however, they have...
ALMA Campaign Provides Unprecedented Views of the Birth of Planets Astronomers have cataloged nearly 4,000 exoplanets in orbit around distant stars. Though the discovery of these newfound worlds has taught us much, there is still a great deal we do not know about the birth of planets and the precise cosmic recipes that spawn the wide array of...
The most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of its smaller neighbors, according to a new study published in the journal Science. The light from this galaxy, known as W2246-0526, took 12.4 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing it as it was when our universe...
Infalling and Outflowing Gas Give More Complete Understanding of the Evolution of Galaxies A billion light-years from Earth lies one of the universe’s most massive structures, a giant elliptical galaxy surrounded by a sprawling cluster of other galaxies known as Abell 2597. At the core of the central galaxy, a supermassive black hole is powering...