An artist's illustration of the cosmic joist with the actual data embedded. Illustration Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser. Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Balashev and P. Noterdaeme et al. Researchers are learning that the jets associated with black holes can do more than we ever expected to destroy their surroundings. New data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the Very Large Telescope have captured two galaxies in the process of colliding and merging into one system. Like two balls flying past one another on a bowl made of gravity, these two systems will pass back and forth...

This image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument shows a portion of the GOODS-North field of galaxies. At the lower right, a pullout highlights the galaxy GN-z11, which is seen at a time just 430 million years after the Big Bang. One prominent...

This illustration provided by the European Southern Observatory in February 2024, depicts the record-breaking quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a supermassive black hole. The supermassive black hole, seen here pulling in...

Galaxy AM 1054-325 has been distorted into an S-shape from a normal pancake-like spiral shape by the gravitational pull of a neighboring galaxy, seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image. A consequence of this is that newborn clusters of stars form along a...