Latest Local Group Stories

Astronomers have discovered the most distant galaxy cluster every found, 10.5 billion light years away from the Milky Way galaxy. Galaxy clusters contain thousands of galaxies and are considered important building blocks with the power to help unravel the mysteries of the early universe. Texas A&M astronomer Dr. Kim-Vy Tran said the cluster is made up of a dense concentration of 30 galaxies that is the seed for a much bigger cluster. "Our galaxy cluster is observed when the...

A spectacularly bright object recently spotted in one of the Milky Way's neighboring galaxies is the result of a "normal" stellar black hole, astronomers have found. An international team of scientists, led by Dr Matt Middleton, of Durham University, analyzed the Ultraluminous X-ray Source (ULX), which was originally discovered in the Andromeda galaxy by NASA's Chandra x-ray observatory. They publish their results in the journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and...

ALMA and Jansky VLA enabling forefront research at frontiers of astrophysics Two new and powerful research tools are helping astronomers gain key insights needed to transform our understanding of important processes across the breadth of astrophysics. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the newly-expanded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) offer scientists vastly improved and unprecedented capabilities for frontier research. The cutting-edge research enabled...

Astronomers have found a cluster of stars that they say survived a massacre 13 billion years ago. The team used computer simulations to look at how the compact groups of stars surrounding our Milky Way galaxy were formed. There are about 200 compact groups sitting close to our galaxy, each containing up to a million stars. The researchers ran simulations of isolated and colliding galaxies, in which they included a model for formation and destruction of stellar clusters. Once a...

An astronomy team has captured images of a nearby dwarf galaxy, lying about 12.5 million light years from Earth. University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) research astronomer Michael Rich, leader of the team, said NGC 4449 may be "something of a living fossil", because it represents what most galaxies looked like shortly after the Big Bang. They found that the dwarf galaxy has a dense stream of stars in its outer regions, which could be the remains of an even smaller companion...

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory are part of an international team that has pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy. The team, led by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), used the database they created and were able to apply information theory techniques to produce the map, explains NRL's Dr. Tracy Clarke, a member of the research team. "The key to applying...

An astronomer has discovered a faint "satellite galaxy" that is the lowest-mass object ever detected 10 billion light years away. Finding this dwarf galaxy at such a long distance away may be able to help astronomers find similar objects and confirm or reject theories about the structure of the universe. University of California physics professor Chris Fassnacht said in a statement that theory predicts that galaxies should be surrounded by halos of smaller, satellite blobs of mass....

Astronomers from University of Pittsburgh seeking to find the true color of our very own Milky Way have revealed that it is so white that it would resemble a fresh blanket of snow to the naked eye. The astronomers said the color of the galaxy is important because it reveals age, ranging from young blue galaxies with new stars still being born, to older red ones that rarely form new stars. It seems we are right in the middle of this range. The Pittsburgh University team wanted to find...

[ Watch the Video ] Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed both a cluster of rare ultra-blue stars and a "double nucleus" of old, reddish stars orbiting a 100-million-solar-mass black hole at the nearby Andromeda spiral galaxy, NASA officials announced on Wednesday. The discoveries, detailed by the U.S. space agency in separate press releases, were also presented Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Austin, Texas. A paper detailing the Hubble...

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have located the most distant grouping of still-developing galaxies ever witnessed in the early universe, NASA announced on Tuesday. According to the U.S. space agency, Hubble found a cluster of five tiny galaxies located 13.1 billion light years away during a random sky survey conducted in near-infrared light. The galaxies in the developing cluster, or protocluster, are said to be among the brightest at that epoch and were...