Latest Galaxy Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers now believe the "monster stars" located in the nearby galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) were formed through the merger of lighter stars. The team wrote in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the group of stars may have formed while smaller stars were in a tight binary system. In 2010, scientists discovered these supermassive stars, one of which is more than 300 times the mass of the...
[Watch Video] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have identified an X-ray signal that followed an observation made last year of a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy. The black hole discovered by the team last year was seen erupting after shredding and consuming a passing star. Astronomers then witnessed days following the observation a distinctive X-ray signal that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole. This...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope offers this wonderful view of the crowded stellar encampment called Messier 68 which is a spherical, star-filled region of space known as a globular cluster. Globular clusters to hang together for many billions of years. This is because mutual gravitational attraction among a cluster’s hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars keeps stellar members in check. By looking at the light of...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The brightest stars in the universe apparently do not like to live alone, according to a new study using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). Nearly three-quarters of the brightest, high mass stars are found to have a close companion star, which is far more than previous thought. Most of these pairs of stars are also experiencing disruptive interactions, like mass transfer from one star to the other. Another third of them are expected...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers from a Japanese university have discovered intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) candidates at the center of the Milky Way, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAO) announced on Friday. Tomoharu Oka, an Associate Professor at Keio University, and colleagues used radio telescopes to locate four black hole candidates approximately 30,000 light-years from the solar system, located in the direction of the...
United Press International reports that U.S. and Canadian astronomers say they've seen a spiral galaxy born in the early universe billions of years before that kind of galaxy should have formed. Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) July 19, 2012 U.S. and Canadian astronomers say they've seen a spiral galaxy born in the early universe billions of years before that kind of galaxy should have formed. The distant spiral galaxy, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, is being seen as it existed...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new discovery may help astronomers peer back in time to when spiral galaxies first began to take their shape. Scientists wrote in the journal Nature that they had found a surprising ancient spiral galaxy known as BX442. The galaxy was found by astronomers who first surveyed 300 distant galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope. They followed up and confirmed it using detailed observations and analyzes from the W.M. Keck...
Astronomers have puzzled over why some puny, extremely faint dwarf galaxies spotted in our Milky Way galaxy's back yard contain so few stars. These ghost-like galaxies are thought to be some of the tiniest, oldest, and most pristine galaxies in the universe. They have been discovered over the past decade by astronomers using automated computer techniques to search through the images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But astronomers needed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to help solve the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has helped scientists unravel the mystery of the extremely faint dwarf galaxies. These galaxies are thought to be some of the tiniest, oldest and most pristine galaxies in the universe. They have been discovered over the past decade by astronomers using automated computer techniques to search through the images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Hubble has given scientists views of three of the small-fry...
Dark galaxies are small, gas-rich galaxies in the early Universe that are very inefficient at forming stars. They are predicted by theories of galaxy formation and are thought to be the building blocks of today's bright, star-filled galaxies. Astronomers think that they may have fed large galaxies with much of the gas that later formed into the stars that exist today. Because they are essentially devoid of stars, these dark galaxies don't emit much light, making them very hard to detect....
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Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
The Virgo Cluster consists of galaxies at a distance of around 59 Mly away in the constellation Virgo. Containing between 1300 to 2000 galaxies the Virgo Cluster is the heart of the Local Supercluster. Its mass is estimated at 1.2 × 1015 M☉ out to 8 degrees of the cluster's center or a radius of about 2.2 Mpc. Most of the brighter galaxies in the cluster were discovered by Charles Messier in the late 1770's and early 1780's, including the giant elliptical Messier 87. Messier...
The two Magellanic Clouds (or Nubeculae Magellani), composed of the Large Megellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, are irregular dwarf galaxies visible in the southern hemisphere. They are members of our Local Group and orbit the Milky Way galaxy. Persian astronomer Al Sufi, in 964, was the first to have written anything about the Magellanic Clouds proving they have been known since early time amongst the Middle East peoples. Sufi, in his Book of Fixed Stars, calls the clouds...
The M96 Group (also known as the Leo I Group), one of many in the Virgo Supercluster, is located within the Leo constellation and contains between 8 and 24 galaxies, including three Messier objects. The Leo Triplet, which is physically near M96 Group, and M96 may actually be separate parts of a much larger group.
The M81 Group, containing the well known galaxies Messier 81 and Messier 82, is a group of galaxies within the constellation Ursa Major. Along with Messier 81 and 82 are several other galaxies with apparent brightness. The center, located at an approximate distance of 3.6 Mpc, is one of the nearest groups to the Local Group. The total estimated mass of the group is (1.03 ± 0.17) × 1012M☉. The Virgo Supercluster contains the M81 Group, the Local Group, and some other nearby...
