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This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), reveals thousands of globular clusters lying at the core of a galaxy cluster. It was created by a Hubble survey that drew on data from three of the telescope’s separate observing programmes to explore the centre of the Coma cluster, a huge gathering of over 1000 galaxies, about 320 million light-years away, all bound together by gravity. Astronomers spotted over 22,000 globular clusters, some of which had formed a bridge connecting a pair of well-known interacting galaxies (NGC 4889 and NGC 4874). A globular cluster is a spherical group of stars that usually orbits a galaxy as a self-contained satellite. However, the globular clusters studied here are of a different type, intracluster globular clusters. Specifically, these are globular clusters that are not bound to an individual galaxy, but to a galaxy cluster — in this case, Coma. While globular clusters orbiting our Milky Way reveal ...

From time immemorial, scientists have tried to unravel the mystery of the universe-from India's Aryabhata to Albert Einstein In a tribute to Albert Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves in 1916, scientists have finally detected the mysterious waves a century later, thereby deepening our understanding of the universe. From time immemorial, scientists have tried to unravel the mystery of the universe. About 1,500 years ago (499 CE) the great Indian scientist, Aryabhata, explained why people and objects do not skid even when the surface of the Earth was spherical in shape and floated in the space without any support. In his notable work  Aryabhatiya,  he pointed out that all objects cling to the surface of our planet like petals of the spherical kadamba flower. He also speculated an attractive force of the Earth to explain why things cling to its surface and not slide down. After Aryabhata, Brahmagupta correctly postulated that attraction is directed towa...