WhyCosmo

  Like two cosmic sumo wrestlers, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected the closest-ever pair of supermassive black holes . Located in the galaxy MCG-03-34-64 , these two giants are just 300 light-years apart and are about to embark on a galactic dance that will eventually end in a massive collision . As they devour gas and dust from their surroundings, they glow brightly as active galactic nuclei (AGN) , giving us a rare peek into the process of galaxy mergers . This is an artist's depiction of a pair of active black holes at the heart of two merging galaxies. They are both surrounded by an accretion disk of hot gas. Some of the material is ejected along the spin axis of each black hole. Confined by powerful magnetic fields, the jets blaze across space at nearly the speed of light as devastating beams of energy. NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) This discovery is even more exciting because such close black hole pairs are scarce in our local un...

 The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an intriguing image of the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 5238 , located 14.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. At first glance, this galaxy might appear as a simple, oversized star cluster rather than a classic galaxy, but there's more to it than meets the eye. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the dwarf irregular galaxy Hubble's image reveals a complex structure teeming with countless stars and globular clusters. Astronomers believe that NGC 5238 had a close encounter with another galaxy approximately a billion years ago. This interaction likely caused the distorted shape of NGC 5238 as gravitational forces pulled and twisted the stars. The absence of a nearby galaxy suggests that NGC 5238 devoured a smaller satellite galaxy. By studying the star population within NGC 5238, astronomers hope to find traces of this consumed galaxy. Indicators include groups of stars with distinct prope...