Latest Galaxy formation and evolution Stories

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...

Lowell Observatory astronomer Deidre Hunter and her team studies small, diffuse galaxies to learn about star formation in those regions and, perhaps, shed light on the birth of the first stars after the Big BangWhen you picture a galaxy in your mind's eye, it's often a spiral with magnificent structure--long, swirling, milky-white arms of stars and gas.Lowell Observatory astronomer Deidre Hunter has spent most of the last 17 years methodically studying galaxies that you might not...

Around a quarter of the globular star clusters in our Milky Way galaxy are invaders from other galaxies, according to a team of scientists from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. In a paper accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Swinburne astronomer Professor Duncan Forbes has shown that many of our galaxy's globular star clusters are actually foreigners - having been born elsewhere and then migrated to our Milky Way. "It turns out that...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A diverse cast of cosmic characters is showcased in the first survey images NASA released Wednesday from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Since WISE began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared images. Four new, processed pictures illustrate a sampling of the...

After years of successful concealment, the most primitive stars outside our Milky Way galaxy have finally been unmasked. New observations using ESO's Very Large Telescope have been used to solve an important astrophysical puzzle concerning the oldest stars in our galactic neighborhood "” which is crucial for our understanding of the earliest stars in the Universe."We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now," says Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper...

University of Arizona astronomers have helped solve a mystery surrounding the birth of stars in galaxies that has long puzzled scientists. Their results are published in the Feb. 11 issue of Nature."We have known for more than a decade that in the early universe "“ three to five billion years after the Big Bang or nine to eleven billion years before today "“ galaxies churned out new stars at a much faster rate than they do now," said Michael Cooper, a postdoctoral Spitzer fellow...

More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this unprecedented, panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly.This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, was made from mosaics taken in September and October 2009 with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and in 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The view covers a portion of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep...

Astronomers are announcing today that they have discovered 33 pairs of waltzing black holes in distant galaxies. This result was presented by Dr. Julia Comerford of the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC. This result is particularly important because it shows that supermassive black hole pairs are more common than previously known from observations, and because the black hole pairs can be used to estimate...

Astronomers on behalf of Galaxy Zoo have unveiled a new game aimed at letting players help them understand how galaxies have formed.The game involves images taken by a camera attached to a telescope in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Game participants are asked to match simulations of colliding galaxies, called galactic mergers.Astronomers say the human brain is much more reliable than even the fastest computer at classifying the shapes of colliding galaxies.The project is led by scientists...

The first large black holes in the universe likely formed and grew deep inside gigantic, starlike cocoons that smothered their powerful x-ray radiation and prevented surrounding gases from being blown away, says a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.The formation process involved two stages, said Mitchell Begelman, a professor and the chair of CU-Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department. The predecessors to black hole formation, objects called supermassive...