For more than a century, astronomers have watched in astonishment as the Andromeda galaxy ignored the grand flow of cosmic expansion and hurtled straight toward the Milky Way. While almost every other ...

For years, astronomers have observed the strange motion of Andromeda, the Milky Way’s closest large galactic neighbor. While ...

This idea is called the big bang model—which is an unfortunate name because it brings to mind a cosmos expanding like an ...

A vast, flat sheet of dark matter may solve the long-standing mystery of why our neighboring galaxy Andromeda is speeding ...

You might think galaxies can’t ever find each other in our runaway cosmos, but it turns out gravity can sometimes overcome ...

Because it takes time for light to travel large distances, the quintet's collision in the far-off reaches of space happened when the universe was just 800 million years old. Such a five-way merger ...

Computer simulations carried out by astronomers from the University of Groningen in collaboration with researchers from Germany, France and Sweden show that most of the (dark) matter beyond the Local ...

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have captured a dazzling new image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)—offering a rare, direct view of one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic ...

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing 100-400 billion stars. Planet Earth sits along one of the galaxy’s spiral arms. Though the Milky Way is generally always visible from Earth, certain times ...

Astronomers have long treated the Milky Way as a kind of cosmic yardstick: if something is true here, maybe it is true everywhere. However, a new study of our nearest large galactic neighbor, M31, ...