Latest Abell Stories

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- By combining the power of NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature's own natural "zoom lenses" in space, astronomers have set a new record for finding the most distant galaxy seen in the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The farthest galaxy appears as a diminutive blob that is only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way galaxy. But it offers a peek back into a time...

Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope got a uniquely close-up look at the brightest "magnified" galaxy yet discovered. This observation provides a unique opportunity to study the physical properties of a galaxy vigorously forming stars when the universe was only one-third its present age. A so-called gravitational lens is produced when space is warped by a massive foreground object, whether it is the sun, a black hole or an entire...

Galaxies are thought to develop by the gravitational attraction between and merger of smaller 'sub-galaxies', a process that standard cosmological ideas suggest should be ongoing. But new data from a team of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University directly challenges this idea, suggesting that the growth of some of the most massive objects stopped 7 billion years ago when the Universe was half its present age. On Monday 18 April team member Claire Burke will present their work at the...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of a giant cosmic magnifying glass to create one of the sharpest and most detailed maps of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible and unknown substance that makes up the bulk of the universe's mass.The new dark matter observations may yield new insights into the role of dark energy in the universe's early formative years. The result suggests that galaxy clusters may have formed earlier than expected, before the...

Astronomers have devised a new method for measuring perhaps the greatest puzzle of our universe "” dark energy. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds.For the first time, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space "” a massive cluster of galaxies "” to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods,...

Abell 1689, shown in this composite image, is a massive cluster of galaxies located about 2.3 billion light years away that shows signs of merging activity. Hundred-million-degree gas detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown as purple in this image, while galaxies from optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope are colored yellow. The X-ray emission has a smooth appearance, unlike other merging systems such as the Bullet Cluster or MACS J0025.4-1222. The temperature pattern...

NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, with a boost from a natural "zoom lens," have uncovered what may be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen in the middle of the cosmic "dark ages," just 700 million years after the beginning of our universe.The detailed images from Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth during the dark ages, a time shortly...

The orbiting X-ray telescopes XXM-Newton and Chandra have caught a pair of galaxy clusters merging into a giant cluster. The discovery adds to existing evidence that galaxy clusters can collide faster than previously thought.When individual galaxies collide and spiral into one another, they discard trails of hot gas that stretch across space, providing signposts to the mayhem. Recognising the signs of collisions between whole clusters of galaxies, however, is not as easy. Undaunted, Renato...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, in collaboration with several other ground- and space- based telescopes, has captured a galaxy being ripped apart by a galaxy cluster's gravitational field and harsh environment. The finding sheds light on the mysterious process by which gas-rich spiral-shaped galaxies might evolve into gas-poor irregular- or elliptical-shaped galaxies over billions of years. The new observations also reveal one mechanism for forming the millions of "homeless" stars...

Thanks to data from ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, a team of international scientists found a comet-like ball of gas over a thousand million times the mass of the sun hurling through a distant galaxy cluster over 750 kilometres per second.This colossal 'ball of fire' is by far the largest object of this kind ever identified. The gas ball is about three million light years across, or about five thousand million times the size of our solar system. It appears from our perspective as a...