Latest Cosmic Evolution Survey Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Australian astronomers are expecting two sky surveys will be on par to discover some 700,000 new galaxies in 2013. The sky surveys, named Wallaby and Dingo, were officially opened earlier this year as part of the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (Askap). The $105 million Askap is located in a remote desert region of Western Australia, roughly 200 miles from Geraldton. Askap consists of 36 dishes, each 39 feet wide,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The intimate details of 100 galaxies in the local universe have been published by the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey (CALIFA). The survey offers up new data, representing the first large-scale effort at "two plus one" mapping of galaxies. For every pixel within each two-dimensional image, scientists could perform a detailed analysis and provide information about dynamics and chemical composition. This information could...

A team of astronomers from the UK, Canada and the Netherlands have commenced a revolutionary new study of cosmic star-formation history, looking back in time to when the universe was still in its lively and somewhat unruly youth! The consortium, co-led by University of Edinburgh astrophysicist Professor James Dunlop, is using a brand new camera called SCUBA-2, the most powerful camera ever developed for observing light at "sub-mm" wavelengths (light that has a wavelength 1000 times longer...

[ Watch the Video ] Treasure trove of new infrared data made available to astronomers ESO's VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a...

A UC Davis graduate student who is leading a study of the collision of galaxy clusters 5 billion light years away discussed the team’s findings today, Jan. 10, in a press briefing at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. “A galaxy cluster is like a little universe, because it has the same matter composition as the whole universe,” said William Dawson, a Ph.D. candidate in physics. “By studying this little universe, we can learn more about our...

A new study combining data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory has turned up a surprise. Most of the huge black holes in the centers of galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been previously thought.At the heart of most, if not all, large galaxies lurks a supermassive black hole with a mass millions, or sometimes billions, times greater than that of the Sun. In many galaxies, including our own Milky...

A group of astronomers [1], led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory, conducted an intensive study of over 446 000 galaxies within the COSMOS field, the result of the largest survey ever conducted with Hubble. In making the COSMOS survey, Hubble photographed 575 slightly overlapping views of the same part of the Universe using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard Hubble. It took nearly 1000 hours of observations.In addition to the Hubble data, researchers used redshift [2]...

The Hubble Space Telescope will devote an unprecedented amount of time over the next few years to documenting galaxy evolution in the early universe and to studying whether distant supernovae can be extremely reliable measures of distance across vast regions of the cosmos.In this ambitious new project, Hubble will image more than 250,000 distant galaxies in five directions, providing the first comprehensive view of the structure and assembly of galaxies over the first third of cosmic time. It...

Mission's decade of success peering into the final frontierXMM-Newton, the most powerful X-ray observatory ever built and launched into space, marks its 10th anniversary on December 10th. XMM-Newton's observations have revolutionized the way we view the hottest and most extreme regions of the Universe.Scientists from the UK who have played a pivotal role in the success of the orbiting observatory, which is the size of a small bus, will be marking the occasion at a special event in Madrid...

On 3 April, ESA astronomers will take part in "˜Around the world in 80 telescopes', a unique live webcast which will be part of the "˜100 Hours of Astronomy' cornerstone project for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Viewers will have a peek into ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral satellite control rooms in Spain.The General Assembly of the United Nations has declared 2009 as the 'International Year of Astronomy' (IYA 2009). This global program was initiated by the International...