Latest Galactic tide Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Many images that we see from the space observatories are beautiful. Swirling colors and bright galaxies make for amazing images. But an image just released from the ground-based Gemini Observatory of the polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 might be the most hauntingly beautiful image ever. Add in the back story of a colorful and dramatic tale of two galaxies locked in a life-and-death struggle, and the picture becomes poetry in motion. All...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com According to recent studies with the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT), a couple celestial neighbor galaxies may have had a close encounter with each other billions of years ago. Astronomers confirmed a disputed 2004 discovery of hydrogen gas streaming between the giant Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy with their new study. "The properties of this gas indicate that these two galaxies may have passed close together in the...
The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighboring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky. A team of astronomers led by Sergey Koposov and Vasily Belokurov of Cambridge University recently discovered two streams of stars in the Southern Galactic hemisphere that were torn off the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. This discovery came from analyzing data from the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and was announced in a paper released today that connects...
Fifty nine new images of colliding galaxies make up the largest collection of Hubble images ever released together. As this astonishing Hubble atlas of interacting galaxies illustrates, galaxy collisions produce a remarkable variety of intricate structures.Interacting galaxies are found throughout the Universe, sometimes as dramatic collisions that trigger bursts of star formation, on other occasions as stealthy mergers that result in new galaxies. A series of 59 new images of colliding...
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" NASA -- It is the job of astronomers to put numbers on the stupefying vastness of space and the objects it holds. That's how they get the universe to spill its secrets. The University of Virginia's Steve Majewski and his team plan to use NASA's SIM PlanetQuest space telescope to make ultra-precise measurements that will...
