UW News

Benjamin Williams


August 29, 2024

Scientists will study nearby galaxies to uncover galactic formation history and dark matter

NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will look for “fossils” of galaxy formation by conducting high-resolution imaging studies. Through a grant from NASA, astronomers are designing a set of possible observations called RINGS — the Roman Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey — that would collect these images, and the team is producing publicly available tools that the astronomy community can use once Roman launches and starts collecting data.


October 28, 2019

Hubble captures galaxies’ ghostly gaze

An image of a galaxy in outer space

An image captured earlier this year by the Hubble Space Telescope may look like a ghostly apparition, but it is not. Hubble is looking at a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies.


January 8, 2019

Triangulum Galaxy shows stunning face in detailed Hubble portrait

An image of a nearby galaxy called M33.

As part of a University of Washington-led project, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has produced a stunningly detailed portrait of the Triangulum Galaxy, displaying a full spiral face aglow with the light of nearly 25 million individually resolved stars.


February 12, 2016

Caught in the act: UW astronomers find a rare supernova ‘impostor’ in a nearby galaxy

The galaxy NGC 300

UW astronomers Breanna Binder and Ben Williams have identified a rare type of ‘supernova impostor’ in a nearby galaxy, with implications for how scientists look at the short, complex lives of massive stars.