Latest Galaxy Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A team of astronomers has grabbed an image of a huge elliptical galaxy with a core that is bigger than any seen before. The team used the Hubble Space Telescope to collect the image of the galaxy, which is about ten times the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. The galaxy is a member of a class of galaxies with an unusually diffuse core filled without a concentrated peak of light around a central black hole. Viewing the core would...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A mysterious infrared glow seen across the entire sky comes from isolated stars beyond the edges of galaxies, according to a new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that these stars once belonged to the galaxies they edge up to, but were stripped away into the relatively empty space outside during violent galaxy mergers. Astronomers have disagreed for a long time...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests a cause for the mysterious glow of infrared light seen across the entire sky. It comes from isolated stars beyond the edges of galaxies. These stars are thought to have once belonged to the galaxies before violent galaxy mergers stripped them away into the relatively empty space outside of their former homes. (Logo:...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online While looking at one of the most distant quasars in the universe, astronomers were surprised to not see an underlying host galaxy of stars feeding it. NASA said the best explanation is that the galaxy is shrouded in so much dust that the stars are completely hidden everywhere. As stars aged and burned out in the early universe, they filled interstellar space with dust as they lost their atmosphere. The quasar dates back to an...
[ Watch the Video: Gigapixel View Of Milky Way ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced this morning that a team of astronomers have catalogued over 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way. This dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies, and is a major step forward for understanding our galaxy. “By observing in detail the myriads of stars surrounding the center of the Milky...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers have found that less than half of Generation X adults can identify our own home in the universe, the spiral galaxy in which we reside. "Knowing your cosmic address is not a necessary job skill, but it is an important part of human knowledge about our universe and—to some extent—about ourselves," said Jon D. Miller, author of "The Generation X Report" and director of the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the U-M...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online While most elliptical galaxies are considered vintage, retired star making neighborhoods, astronomers have found one that has a personality more like that of a pinwheel-shaped spiral galaxy. Centaurus A isn't considered to be a typical elliptical galaxy to begin with. It is known for its dark dust lane across its middle, which is a sign that it swallowed up a spiral galaxy about 300 million years ago. "No other elliptical galaxy...
[WATCH VIDEO: Computer Model Shows a Disk Galaxy’s Life History] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online After a comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies, astronomers have uncovered a surprising trend in galaxy evolution. The team studied a sample of 544 blue galaxies from the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe 2 (DEEP2) Redshift Survey, and wrote about their findings in The Astrophysical Journal. "Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had...
MERRILL, N.Y., Oct. 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Super Directories, Inc. (SDIR.PK) announced the execution of a memorandum of understanding with Galaxy Spectrum Broadcast Production Systems Corp ("Galaxy Spectrum") for the licensing of "sigCaster", a portable video broadcast software and hardware solution developed by Galaxy Spectrum. Additionally, the sigCaster is designed as a robust IPTV plug-n-play turnkey solution unit and needs next to no servicing or maintenance in its...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago,...
Latest Galaxy Reference Libraries
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...
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