About 12 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy known as LKH collided with a young Milky Way and merged with it. This artist’s concept portrays that collision. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered definitive evidence of this collision by studying globular star clusters. Illustration: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew
A new study using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has seen a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper decline over the past 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the naked
The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a spiral galaxy battling titanic forces appearing on galactic scales in space. This is NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). It is classified as “intermediate” because its overall shape falls between spiral galaxies that have a bar in their
Blue and white stars shine brightly against a crimson background of glowing gas in this July 3, 2026 image of the LH 95 star nursery on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. LH 95 is a region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Low-mass child stars live alongside massive blue giant
The enormous globular star cluster Omega Centauri has baffled astronomers for decades. It should be full of black holes left by exploding stars, but the evidence for them is scarce. Now, astronomers using archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and supporting observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have finally located their first stellar-mass
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows Messier 3 (M3), one of the Milky Way’s most massive globular clusters, or spherical collections of gravitationally bound stars. Globular clusters are made up of ancient stars that formed around the same time from the same cloud of gas, giving them similar ages. About 150 known globular