New observations with National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope suggest that what was once believed to be an intergalactic cloud of unknown distance and significance, is actually a previously unrecognized satellite galaxy of the Milky Way orbiting backward around the Galactic center.

An international team of astronomers has discovered that a young galaxy had a central disk of gas in which hundreds of new stars were being born every year — at a time when the Universe was only a fraction of its current age.

In a major breakthrough for understanding what one of them calls ‘the most exotic environment in the Universe,’ a team of astronomers has discovered that powerful radio bursts in pulsars are generated by structures as small as a beach ball.

Dr Rita Colwell, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Dr Catherine Cesarsky, director general of the European Southern Observatory, today signed a historic agreement jointly to construct and operate ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the world’s largest and most powerful radio telescope operating at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths.

Astronomers have traced the orbit through our Milky Way Galaxy of a voracious neutron star and a companion star it is cannibalizing, and conclude that the pair joined more than 30 million years ago and probably were catapulted out of a cluster of stars far from the Galaxy’s center.

An intensive study of a neighboring dwarf galaxy has surprised astronomers by showing that most of its molecular gas — the raw material for new stars — is scattered among clumps in the galaxy’s outskirts, not near its center as they expected.