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Gravitational Lensing
It's the Universe's ultimate chicken-and-egg question: what came first, the galaxy or the black hole? One Little Red Dot proves the answer.
The first colliding galaxy cluster to reveal dark matter, empirically, turns 20 this year. Here's why it cements dark matter's existence.
Most massive galaxies are spiral or elliptical shaped. But peculiar galaxies showcase the beautiful violence that helps explain our cosmos.
The Universe is expanding, the expansion is accelerating, and some galaxies even recede faster-than-light. Can we see a change in real time?
Many collaborations have used JWST to take deep-field images: some wider and some deeper than others. Here's how it can surpass them all.
The Universe formed stars, galaxies, and even galaxy clusters extremely early on in our cosmos. This new marvel is one more JWST surprise.
With unprecedented resolution, wavelength sensitivity, and light-gathering power, JWST reveals our cosmos like no other observatory ever.
Gravitational lenses arise when foreground masses and background light sources properly align. Einstein rings are rare, but crosses abound.
The VENUS survey isn't about planets at all, but about finding multiply-lensed supernovae. The ambition? To save the expanding Universe.
Back in 1604, Johannes Kepler discovered the Milky Way's last naked-eye supernova. Here's how NASA's Chandra sees it over the 21st century.
With the observation of SN 2025wny, a lensed superluminous supernova, astronomy's future comes into sharp, exciting focus.
The method you use to measure the expanding Universe determines which of two answers you'll get. Lensed supernovae can't resolve that issue.
Spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars are all more common than ring galaxies. At last, we know how these ultra-rare objects are made.
Wavelengths stretch, distances grow, and temperatures cool as the Universe expands with time. How are the various cosmic parameters related?
By deeply imaging a large volume of space, COSMOS-Web provides JWST's widest cosmic views. Its gravitational lenses reveal a big surprise.
At the center of Hubble's famous "cosmic horseshoe," a very heavy supermassive black hole has been robustly measured. How is it possible?
For hundreds of millions of years, a cosmic fog blocked all signs of starlight. At last, JWST found the galaxies that cleared that fog away.
Massive galaxy cluster Abell S1063, 4.5 billion light-years away, bends and distorts the space nearby. Here's what a JWST deep field shows.
The COSMOS-Web has just finalized their release of their full field: larger and deeper than any other JWST program. Here's what's inside.
There's an old saying that "what you see is what you get." When it comes to the Universe, however, there's often more to the full story.
Even from a single pixel, multiwavelength data taken over time can reveal clouds, icecaps, oceans, continents, and even signs of life.
Our scientific instruments are constantly improving, revealing nature's workings as never before. Without them, we'll remain in the dark.
When we see spiral galaxies, some are face-on, others are edge-on, but most are tipped at an angle. But which side is closest to us?
The Universe is expanding, and individual, bound structures are all receding away from one another. How, then, are galaxies still colliding?
One of the most promising dark matter candidates is light particles, like axions. With JWST, we can rule out many of those options already.
Dark matter doesn't absorb or emit light, but it gravitates. Instead of something exotic and novel, could it just be dark, normal matter?
Ring galaxies are rare, but we think we know how they form. A new, early-stage version, the Bullseye galaxy, provides a new testing ground.
Only 5% of the Universe is made of normal "stuff" like we are. Could there be dark matter or dark energy life, or even aliens, out there?
Here in our Universe, both normal and dark matter can be measured astrophysically. But only normal matter can collapse. Why is that?
It's not only the gravity from galaxies in a cluster that reveals dark matter, but the ejected, intracluster stars actually trace it out.