Latest Galaxies Stories

NASA said on Wednesday that astronomers have found the first evidence that black holes were common in the early universe. The new discovery shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought and in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.  NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was used to help make this discovery. NASA said by pointing Chandra to a patch of sky for more than six weeks, astronomers obtained the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS).  When this...

Portrayed in movies and on television most often as gateways to another dimension or cosmic vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in sight, the misconceptions surrounding black holes are many and varied. In reality, black holes form when, at the end of their life cycle, heavy stars collapse into a supernova. After a black hole forms, it can continue to grow by absorbing its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, giant black holes -- called supermassive --...

Astronomers from the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) have produced a completely new catalogue of ~15,000 groups of galaxies that gives a new insight into dark matter, the material of unknown composition that makes up a fifth of the mass of the Universe. Dr Aaron Robotham of the University of St Andrews presented the work of the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) team in his talk on Thursday 21 April at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno,...

A team at Bristol University have found irrevocable evidence that explains how an unusual type of galaxy, so-called compact ellipticals (cEs), are formed and have discovered two examples in which they see the process of formation in action. Team leader Dr Avon Huxor will present their work on Wednesday 20 April at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales.Compact elliptical galaxies are small in size and with high brightness. There are two main theories...

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...

Discovery gives important clues about a previously-unobserved, very early phase of galaxy evolutionThe surprising discovery of a supermassive black hole in a small nearby galaxy has given astronomers a tantalizing look at how black holes and galaxies may have grown in the early history of the Universe. Finding a black hole a million times more massive than the Sun in a star-forming dwarf galaxy is a strong indication that supermassive black holes formed before the buildup of galaxies, the...

Astronomers believe they have discovered the origin of our universe's first super-massive black holes, which formed some 13 billion years ago.The discovery fills in a missing chapter of our universe's early history, and could help write the next chapter -- in which scientists better understand how gravity and dark matter formed the universe as we know it.In the journal Nature, Ohio State University astronomer Stelios Kazantzidis and colleagues describe computer simulations in which they...

Galaxies like our own were built billions of years ago from a deluge of giant clouds of gas, some of which continue to rain down. Now new calculations tie the rain of giant clouds of gas to active galactic nuclei (AGN), the extremely bright centers of some galaxies. If a gas cloud with millions of times more mass than our Sun wanders too close to the center of a galaxy, it can either be consumed by the supermassive black hole that lurks there or, through shocks and collapse, give birth to new...

Combining observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars. The discovery is reported this week in the journal Nature."We have been astonished by how much energy is injected into the gas by...

Going against the grain may turn out to be a powerful move for black holes. New research suggests supermassive black holes that spin backwards might produce more ferocious jets of gas. The results have broad implications for how galaxies change over time. "A lot of what happens in an entire galaxy depends on what's going on in the miniscule central region where the black hole lies," said theoretical astrophysicist David Garofalo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,...