Our Milky Way Galaxy is not alone in space. There are a number of smaller satellite galaxies which orbit around it. In the southern hemisphere, one can easily see two of our closest neighbours without a telescope, which are the well-known Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, about 160,000--200,000 light years away from us. What these satellite galaxies consist of and how they were formed is an interesting research topic

Taking our Galaxy as a vast sea, astronomers are the fishing men using telescopes to catch light from different objects. Recently, thanks to the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope

A new study led by an astronomer from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) has found evidence revealing a cosmic cannibalizing event --- M81, one of the nearest massive galaxies, is eating two neighboring smaller galaxies and continues to grow. “This is the first endeavor beyond the Local Group of galaxies to demonstrate the hierarchical galaxy assembly process on galactic scales," said team member Dr. Sakurako Okamoto from SHAO. This work has recently been published by the Astrophysical Journal

SHAO astronomers have studied the emission properties of the second transitional millisecond pulsar binary in the gamma-ray band. Combining other multiband information, they have revealed the physics behind the transitional phase.

On April 8, 2015, the Shanghai Astronomical Society and the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) ran a seminar to explain the current strategy and future plan of science communication and call for more researchers to provide

In the current universe, large scale environments are mainly consists of these four types: clusters, filaments, sheets and voids. According to the current paradigm of galaxy formation, these structures arise from the linear growth of density fluctuations in a nearly homo

Using the observational data from the 2.4-m Lijiang Telescope (LJT) in Yunnan China, the 6.5-m Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), and the 8.4-m Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona, USA, the 6.5m Magellan Telescope in Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, and the 8.2-m Gemini North Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA, an international team led by Prof. Xue-Bing Wu at Peking University discovered a new quasar, with its central black hole mass of 12 billion solar masses and the luminosity of 420 trillion solar luminosity, at a distance of 12.8 billions light years from the earth. This is the brightest quasar ever discovered in the early Universe, powered by the most massive black hole yet known at that