Latest Elliptical galaxy Stories

Previous galaxy merger is likely causeA team of astronomy researchers at Florida Institute of Technology and Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States and University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, find that the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the most massive local galaxy (M87) is not where it was expected. Their research, conducted using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), concludes that the SMBH in M87 is displaced from the galaxy center.The most likely cause...

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have solved a long-standing dilemma about the mass of infrared bright merging galaxies. Because galaxies are the largest directly observable objects in the universe, learning more about their formation is key to understanding how the universe works.Dr. Barry Rothberg and Dr. Jacqueline Fischer, both of the Infrared-Submillimeter Astrophysics & Techniques Section in the Remote Sensing Division, used new data from the 8-meter Gemini-South...

Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17, is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky of a type known as a fossil group. Astronomers use this term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies. However, are they like fossils "” the last remnants of a once active community "” or is it more sinister than that? Did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors?Gravity brings galaxies together and bigger ones swallow smaller ones. There is evidence that our...

A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other space instruments has discovered that a collection of small, ancient galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 31 (HCG 31), finally is coming together into one larger galaxy after 10 billion years. The images the team recorded offer a window into the universe's early years, when the buildup of large galaxies from smaller building blocks was common.According to Jane Charlton, a Penn State professor of astronomy and...

Imagine finding a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have found the astronomical equivalent of prehistoric life in our intergalactic backyard: a group of small, ancient galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to come together. These "late bloomers" are on their way to building a large elliptical galaxy.Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are normally seen billions of light-years away and therefore occurred billions of years ago. But these galaxies, members of Hickson...

For the first time, two astronomers have explained the diversity of galaxy shapes seen in the universe. The scientists, Dr Andrew Benson of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Dr Nick Devereux of Embry-Riddle University in Arizona, tracked the evolution of galaxies over thirteen billion years from the early Universe to the present day. Their results appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Galaxies are the collections of stars, planets, gas and...

Just as many people are surprised to find themselves packing on unexplained weight around the middle, astronomers find the evolution of bulges in the centers of spiral galaxies puzzling. A recent NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 4710 is part of a survey that astronomers have conducted to learn more about the formation of bulges, which are a substantial component of most spiral galaxies.When targeting spiral galaxy bulges, astronomers often seek edge-on galaxies, as their bulges...

Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way.The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today. The results will be published in the August 6, 2009 issue of...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strong new line of evidence that galaxies are embedded in halos of dark matter.Peering into the tumultuous heart of the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster, Hubble discovered a large population of small galaxies that have remained intact while larger galaxies around them are being ripped apart by the gravitational tug of other galaxies.Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass. Astronomers have deduced the...

A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf...