These vivid peacock clouds were created by violent galactic interactions | CNN

This illustration shows a massive star on the brink of explosion.

Chuck Carter/Caltech

Meet the fastest asteroid in our solar system, which zips around the sun every 113 days. This artist's rendering shows the asteroid 2021 PH27 (top right) and Mercury (below) orbiting the sun.

CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva

A ghostly set of X-ray rings were found around a black hole with a companion star. These rings are created by light echoes.

CXC/U.Wisc-Madison/S. Heinz et al./Pan-STARRS/NASA

This image, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, shows the PDS 70 system 400 light-years away. This planetary system is still forming and still in the process of being formed. One of the planets in the system has a moon-forming disk around it.

ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO/Benisty et al.

This image shows supernova 2018zd (pictured as the large white dot on the right), a new type of supernova called an electron capture. To the left is the galaxy NGC 2146.

NASA/STSCI/J. Depasquale; Las Cumbres Observatory

This image from the STARFORGE simulation shows the "Anvil of Creation," a giant gas cloud with individual stars forming inside of it.

From Northwestern University/UT Austin

Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A and discovered titanium, shown in light blue, blasting out of it. The colors represent other elements detected, like iron (orange), oxygen (purple), silicon (red) and magnesium (green).

T. Sato et al./RIKEN/CXC/NASA

The supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, the first to ever be imaged, can now be seen in polarized light. Swirling lines reveal the magnetic field near the edge of the black hole.

European Southern Observatory

This image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey shows the galaxy J0437+2456, which includes a supermassive black hole at its center that appears to be moving.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

This artist's impression shows how the distant quasar P172+18 and its radio jets may have looked 13 billion years ago. The light from the quasar has taken that long to reach us, so astronomers observed the quasar as it looked in the early universe.

M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory

This image shows the vicinity of the Tucana II ultrafaint dwarf galaxy, captured by the SkyMapper telescope.

Anirudh Chiti/MIT

These images show two giant radio galaxies found with using the MeerKAT telescope. The red in both images shows the radio light being emitted by the galaxies against a background of the sky as it is seen in visible light.

I. Heywood/Oxford/Rhodes/SARAO

This artist's conception of quasar J0313-1806 depicts it as it was 670 million years after the Big Bang. Quasars are highly energetic objects at the centers of galaxies, powered by black holes and brighter than entire galaxies.

NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva

Shown here is a phenomenon known as zodiacal light, which is caused by sunlight reflecting off tiny dust particles in the inner solar system.

Zolt Levay/Space Telescope Science Institute

This artist's impression of the distant galaxy ID2299 shows some of its gas being ejected by a "tidal tail" as a result of a merger between two galaxies.

M. Kornmesser/ESO

This diagram shows the two most important companion galaxies to the Milky Way: the Large Magellanic Cloud (left) and the Small Magellanic Cloud. It was made using data from the European Space Agency Gaia satellite.

Laurent Chemin/ESA/Gaia/DPAC

The Blue Ring Nebula is thought to be a never-before-seen phase that occurs after the merger of two stars. Debris flowing out from the merger was sliced by a disk around one of the stars, creating two cones of material glowing in ultraviolet light.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Seibert/K. Hoadley/GALEX Team

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, experienced unprecedented dimming late in 2019. This image was taken in January using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

ESO/M. Montargès et al.

This is an infrared image of Apep, a Wolf-Rayet star binary system located 8,000 light-years from Earth.

European Southern Observatory

An artist's illustration, left, helps visualize the details of an unusual star system, GW Orionis, in the Orion constellation. The system's circumstellar disk is broken, resulting in misaligned rings around its three stars.

ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.

This is a simulation of two spiral black holes that merge and emit gravitational waves.

N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno, MPIGP, SXS Collaboration

This artist's illustration shows the unexpected dimming of the star Betelgeuse.

ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

This extremely distant galaxy, which looks similar to our own Milky Way, appears like a ring of light.

Rizzo et al./ALMA/European Southern Observatory

This artist's interpretation shows the calcium-rich supernova 2019ehk. The orange represents the calcium-rich material created in the explosion. Purple reveals gas shed by the star right before the explosion.

Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern University

The blue dot at the center of this image marks the approximate location of a supernova event which occurred 140 million light-years from Earth, where a white dwarf exploded and created an ultraviolet flash. It was located close to tail of the Draco constellation.

Northwestern University

This radar image captured by NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in 1991 shows a corona, a large circular structure 120 miles in diameter, named Aine Corona.

From NASA/JPL

When a star's mass is ejected during a supernova, it expands quickly. Eventually, it will slow and form a hot bubble of glowing gas. A white dwarf will emerge from this gas bubble and move across the galaxy.

Mark Garlick/University of Warwick

The afterglow of short gamma ray burst that was detected 10 billion light-years away is shown here in a circle. This image was taken by the Gemini-North telescope.

International Gemini Observatory/K. Paterson/W. Fong/Northwestern University

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7513, a barred spiral galaxy 60 million light-years away. Due to the expansion of the universe, the galaxy appears to be moving away from the Milky Way at an accelerate rate.

Hubble Space Telescope/NASA/ESA/M. Stiavelli

This artist's concept illustration shows what the luminous blue variable star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy may have looked like before it mysteriously disappeared.

L. Calçada/ESO

This is an artist's illustration of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding disk of gas. Inside this disk are two smaller black holes orbiting one another. Researchers identified a flare of light suspected to have come from one such binary pair soon after they merged into a larger black hole.

Robert Hurt/California Institute of Technology

This image, taken from a video, shows what happens as two objects of different masses merge together and create gravitational waves.

Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration

This is an artist's impression showing the detection of a repeating fast radio burst seen in blue, which is in orbit with an astrophysical object seen in pink.

Kristi Mickaliger

Fast radio bursts, which make a splash by leaving their host galaxy in a bright burst of radio waves, helped detect "missing matter" in the universe.

ICRAR

A new type of explosion was found in a tiny galaxy 500 million light-years away from Earth. This type of explosion is referred to as a fast blue optical transient.

Giacomo Terreran/Northwestern University

Astronomers have discovered a rare type of galaxy described as a "cosmic ring of fire." This artist's illustration shows the galaxy as it existed 11 billion years ago.

James Josephides/Swinburne Astronomy Productions

This is an artist's impression of the Wolfe Disk, a massive rotating disk galaxy in the early universe.

NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

A bright yellow "twist" near the center of this image shows where a planet may be forming around the AB Aurigae star. The image was captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

ESO/Boccaletti et al.

This artist's illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1,000 light-years from Earth. This system includes one star (small orbit seen in blue) orbiting a newly discovered black hole (orbit in red), as well as a third star in a wider orbit (also in blue).

European Southern Observatory/ESO/L. Calçada

This illustration shows a star's core, known as a white dwarf, pulled into orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole rips off more material from the star and pulls it into a glowing disk of material around the black hole. Before its encounter with the black hole, the star was a red giant in the last stages of stellar evolution.

NASA/CXO/CSIC-INTA/G.Miniutti et al./CXC/M. Weiss

This artist's illustration shows the collision of two 125-mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away. The observation of the aftermath of this collision was once thought to be an exoplanet.

M. Kornmesser/ESA/NASA

This is an artist's impression of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov as it travels through our solar system. New observations detected carbon monixide in the cometary tail as the sun heated the comet.

NRAO/AUI/NSF/S. Dagnello

This rosette pattern is the orbit of a star, called S2, around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

European Southern Observatory/ESO/L. Calçada

This is an artist's illustration of SN2016aps, which astronomers believe is the brightest supernova ever observed.

M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

This is an artist's illustration of a brown dwarf, or a "failed star" object, and its magnetic field. The brown dwarf's atmosphere and magnetic field rotate at different speeds, which allowed astronomers to determine wind speed on the object.

Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

This artist's illustration shows an intermediate-mass black hole tearing into a star.

M. Kornmesser/ESA/Hubble

This is an artist's impression of a large star known as HD74423 and its much smaller red dwarf companion in a binary star system. The large star appears to pulsate on one side only, and it's being distorted by the gravitational pull of its companion star into a teardrop shape.

Gabriel Pérez Díaz/Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands

This is an artist's impression of two white dwarfs in the process of merging. While astronomers expected that this might cause a supernova, they have found an instance of two white dwarf stars that survived merging.

University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

A combination of space and ground-based telescopes have found evidence for the biggest explosion seen in the universe. The explosion was created by a black hole located in the Ophiuchus cluster's central galaxy, which has blasted out jets and carved a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas.

S. Giacintucci, et al./NRL/CXC/NASA

This new ALMA image shows the outcome of a stellar fight: a complex and stunning gas environment surrounding the binary star system HD101584.

ESO/NAOJ/NRAO/ALMA

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured the Tarantula Nebula in two wavelengths of infrared light. The red represents hot gas, while the blue regions are interstellar dust.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

A white dwarf, left, is pulling material off of a brown dwarf, right, about 3,000 light-years from Earth.

NASA/L. Hustak

This image shows the orbits of the six G objects at the center of our galaxy, with the supermassive black hole indicated with a white cross. Stars, gas and dust are in the background.

Anna Ciurlo/Tuan Do/UCLA Galactic Center Group

After stars die, they expel their particles out into space, which form new stars in turn. In one case, stardust became embedded in a meteorite that fell to Earth. This illustration shows that stardust could flow from sources like the Egg Nebula to create the grains recovered from the meteorite, which landed in Australia.

NASA/W. Sparks (STScI)/R. Sahai

The former North Star, Alpha Draconis or Thuban, is circled here in an image of the northern sky.

NASA

Galaxy UGC 2885, nicknamed the "Godzilla galaxy," may be the largest one in the local universe.

NASA/ESA/B. Holwerda (University of Louisville)

The host galaxy of a newly traced repeating fast radio burst acquired with the 8-meter Gemini-North telescope.

Danielle Futselaar/artsource.nl

Wonders of the universe

CNN —

Two colorful gas clouds shaped like peacocks have been spotted in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy about 163,000 light years away.

In the vastness of space, it’s nice to have a neighbor. For our galaxy, the Milky Way, that’s the Large Magellanic Cloud and its sibling, the Small Magellanic Cloud. These dwarf galaxies act like satellites of our own galaxy.

The clouds were spotted by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, known as ALMA, consisting of 66 radio telescopes in Chile. But their beauty may mask a violent past between the two dwarf galaxies.

Both clouds, made up of complex gas filaments, contain several massive baby stars. Astronomers who made the discovery said that this matches with previous computer simulations that model the collision of gas clouds.

The gas and the young stars act like evidence from a crime scene, suggesting a confrontation by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds 200 million years ago, the researchers estimate.

Stars themselves form from clouds of gas and dust. But astronomers don’t entirely understand how giant stars, weighing in at 10 times more massive than our sun, or larger, can form in small regions because they require so much material.

But when galaxies interact with each other, it’s the perfect setting for massive stars to form. The gravity of both galaxies interacting is immense, causing gaseous clouds within them to collide. This creates a large amount of gas in a small area. Then, massive stars can form.

The researchers used ALMA to take a closer look at a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud called N159, along with detailed looks at clouds in two parts of it.

In this case, both clouds are shaped similarly, resembling peacocks with their tailfeathers outstretched in a fan.

“It is unnatural that in two regions separated by 150 light years, clouds with such similar shapes were formed and that the ages of the baby stars are similar,” said Kazuki Tokuda, a researcher at Osaka Prefecture University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. “There must be a common cause of these features. Interaction between the LMC and SMC is a good candidate.”

Previous research investigating the movement of gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud suggested that a boom of star formation may be fed by a glow of gas coming from the Small Magellanic Cloud. This new observation lines up.

“For the first time, we uncovered a link between massive star formation and galaxy interactions in very sharp detail,” said Yasuo Fukui, a professor at Nagoya University. “This is an important step in understanding the formation process of massive star clusters in which galaxy interactions have a big impact.”

Two studies about the observation published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Large Magellanic Cloud will catastrophically collide with the Milky Way in 2 billion years, according to a study published in January in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The impact, which they believe is long overdue, has a chance of sending our solar system “hurtling through space.”

Our galaxy is orbited by smaller satellite galaxies, the kind of dance that can go on undisturbed for billions of years. Other times, things take a violent turn and satellite galaxies can migrate toward the Milky Way until they collide and are gobbled up.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is fairly new to orbiting the Milky Way, entering our corner of the universe 1.5 billion years ago. It’s now the brightest satellite galaxy we have. Previously, astronomers thought it would hang out in a quiet, long orbit or speed away from the gravity of the Milky Way and move on.

But new measurements suggest that this little satellite galaxy was hiding a big secret, and it has a much larger mass than expected. This means the Large Magellanic Cloud is losing energy, which will trigger it to collide with the Milky Way.