Latest Local Group Stories

Stanford University astrophysicist Risa Wechsler andother researchers have found that only four percent of galaxies are similar to the Milky Way galaxy. The team compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies in terms of luminosity and distance to other bright galaxies.  They found that galaxies with two satellites that are as bright and close by as the Milk Way's two closest satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are hard to come by. According to a press release by the National...

NASA said on Wednesday that astronomers have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in space. The astronomers believe these worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems. A Japan-New Zealand joint survey scanned the center of the Milky Way galaxy during 2006 and 2007, revealing evidence for up to 10 free-floating planets about the size of Jupiter.  "Although free-floating planets have been predicted, they finally have been detected, holding...

ESA's fleet of space telescopes has captured the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, in different wavelengths (see video). Most of these wavelengths are invisible to the eye and each shows a different aspect of the galaxy's nature.Visible light, as seen by optical ground-based telescopes and our eyes, reveals the various stars that shine in the Andromeda Galaxy, yet it is just one small part of the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. There are many different wavelengths that...

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...

A study of spiral patterns found in galaxies like our Milky Way could overturn the theory of how the spiral arm features form and evolve. The results are being presented by postgraduate student, Robert Grand, at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales this week.Since 1960s, the most widely accepted explanation has been that the spiral arm features move like a Mexican wave in a crowd, passing through a population of stars that then return to their...

Like looking for Easter eggs in a lawn of long grass, the hunt for the Milky Way's most massive stars takes persistence and sharp eyes. In their stellar search through our Galactic backyard, astronomers have used powerful telescopes sensitive to X-ray and infrared radiation to find evidence for a substantial population of X-ray emitting massive stars.This image shows infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. Both outlined boxes contain an...

The region around the center of our Milky Way galaxy glows colorfully in this new version of an image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.The data were previously released as part of a long, 120-degree view of the plane our galaxy (see this page). Now, data from the very center of that picture are being presented at a different contrast to better highlight this jam-packed region. In visible-light pictures, it is all but impossible to see the heart of our galaxy, but infrared light...

Young, but surprisingly grown-upAstronomers have used an armada of telescopes on the ground and in space, including the Very Large Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile to discover and measure the distance to the most remote mature cluster of galaxies yet found. Although this cluster is seen when the Universe was less than one quarter of its current age it looks surprisingly similar to galaxy clusters in the current Universe."We have measured the distance to the most distant mature...

This image of NGC 247, taken by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, reveals the fine details of this highly inclined spiral galaxy and its rich backdrop. Astronomers say this highly tilted orientation, when viewed from Earth, explains why the distance to this prominent galaxy was previously overestimated.The spiral galaxy NGC 247 is one of the closest spiral galaxies of the southern sky. In this new view from the Wide Field Imager...

Continent-wide telescope extends cosmic 'yardstick' three times farther into universeUsing the super-sharp radio "vision" of astronomy's most precise telescope, scientists have extended a directly-measured "yardstick" three times farther into the cosmos than ever before, an achievement with important implications for numerous areas of astrophysics, including determining the nature of Dark Energy, which constitutes 70 percent of the Universe. The continent-wide Very Long...