Latest I Zwicky 18 Stories

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...

Japanese astronomers say they have discovered the oldest and most distant galaxy in the universe using a telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii, a finding that challenges other “earliest galaxy” claims. Using the Subaru and Keck Telescopes at Mauna Kea, the group said their galaxy, called SXDF-NB1006-2, has a distance of 12.91 billion light years from Earth, or more than 77 trillion billion miles away. Reporting in the Astrophysical Journal, the National Astronomical Observatory of...

[ Watch the Video ] Baby galaxies from the young Universe more than 12 billion years ago evolved faster than previously thought, shows new research from the Niels Bohr Institute. This means that already in the early history of the Universe, there was potential for planet formation and life. The research results have been published in the scientific journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. For several thousand years after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,...

WASHINGTON, April 17, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Several million young stars are vying for attention in a new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a raucous stellar breeding ground in 30 Doradus, a star-forming complex located in the heart of the Tarantula nebula. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The new image comprises one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble photos and includes observations taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3...

A team of astronomers lead by Masami Ouchi of the University of Tokyo has found the most vigorous star-forming galaxy yet seen, from a period of time in the early stages of the creation of the universe known as ‘cosmic dawn’. The 750-million-year-old galaxy, known as GN-108036 among was forming stars equivalent to about a hundred Suns per year, when most of the universe was still cold and dark, reports Rob Waugh for Mail Online. The galaxy, 12.9 billion light-years away, was...

New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are expanding astronomers' understanding of the ways in which galaxies continuously recycle immense volumes of hydrogen gas and heavy elements. This process allows galaxies to build successive generations of stars stretching over billions of years. This ongoing recycling keeps some galaxies from emptying their "fuel tanks" and stretches their star-forming epoch to over 10 billion years. This conclusion is based on a series of Hubble...

[ Watch the Video ] Hubble’s famous images of galaxies typically show elegant spirals or soft-edged ellipses. But these neat forms are only representative of large galaxies. Smaller galaxies like the dwarf irregular galaxy Holmberg II come in many shapes and types that are harder to classify. This galaxy’s indistinct shape is punctuated by huge glowing bubbles of gas, captured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The intricate glowing shells of gas in Holmberg II...

A team of scientists, led by Michael Rauch from the Carnegie Observatories, has discovered a distant galaxy that may help elucidate two fundamental questions of galaxy formation: How galaxies take in matter and how they give off energetic radiation. Their work will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. During the epoch when the first galaxies formed, it is believed that they radiated energy, which hit surrounding neutral hydrogen atoms and excited them to...

A unique example of some of the lowest surface brightness galaxies in the universe have been found by an international team of astronomers lead by the Niels Bohr Institute. The galaxy has lower amounts of heavier elements than other known galaxies of this type. The discovery means that small low surface brightness galaxies may have more in common with the first galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang than previously thought. The results have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal...

Astronomers using NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer may be closer to knowing why some of the most massive stellar explosions ever observed occur in the tiniest of galaxies."It's like finding a sumo wrestler in a little 'Smart Car,'" said Don Neill, a member of NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead author of a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal."The most powerful explosions of massive stars are...