Visible in the constellation of Andromeda, NGC 891 is located approximately 30 million light-years away from Earth. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope turned its powerful wide field Advanced Camera for Surveys towards this spiral galaxy and took this close-up of its northern half. The galaxy’s central bulge is just out of the image on the… [Read more…]
April 3, 2012
Euaggelos E. Zotos In the present article, we present a new gravitational galactic model, describing motion in elliptical as well as in disk galaxies, by suitably choosing the dynamical parameters. Moreover, a new dynamical parameter, the S(g) spectrum, is introduced and used, in order to detect islandic motion of resonant orbits and the evolution of… [Read more…]
March 21, 2012
Speca – An Intriguing Look Into The Beginning Of A Black Hole Jet Its catalog number is NGC 3801, but its name is SPECA – a Spiral-host Episodic radio galaxy tracing Cluster Accretion. That’s certainly a mouthful of words for this unusual galaxy, but there’s a lot more going on here than just its name.… [Read more…]
March 20, 2012
Astronomers discover ‘emerald-cut’ galaxy An international team of astronomers has discovered a rare square galaxy with a striking resemblance to an emerald cut diamond. The astronomers – from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and Finland – discovered the rectangular shaped galaxy within a group of 250 galaxies some 70 million light years away. “In the Universe around… [Read more…]
March 14, 2012
New observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope are making a major contribution to understanding the growth of adolescent galaxies. In the biggest survey of its kind astronomers have found that galaxies changed their eating habits during their teenage years – the period from about 3 to 5 billion years after the Big Bang. At… [Read more…]
March 13, 2012
Quasars are among the most energetic objects in the universe, with some of them as luminous as ten thousand Milky Way galaxies. Quasars are thought to have massive black holes at their cores, and astronomers also think that the regions around the black holes actively accrete matter, a process that releases vast amounts of energy… [Read more…]
February 15, 2012
This spectacular edge-on galaxy, called ESO 243-49, is home to an intermediate-mass black hole that may have been stripped off of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy. The estimated 20,000-solar-mass black hole lies above the galactic plane. This is an unlikely place for such a massive back hole to exist, unless it belonged to a small galaxy… [Read more…]
February 10, 2012
Many of the Universe’s galaxies are like our own, displaying beautiful spiral arms wrapping around a bright nucleus. Examples in this stunning image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, include the tilted galaxy at the bottom of the frame, shining behind a Milky Way star, and the small… [Read more…]
January 25, 2012
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark… [Read more…]
January 23, 2012
This image shows the swirling shape of galaxy NGC 2217, in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). In the central region of the galaxy is a distinctive bar of stars within an oval ring. Further out, a set of tightly wound spiral arms almost form a circular ring around the galaxy. NGC 2217… [Read more…]
January 12, 2012
A new Hubble Space Telescope image centers on the 100-million-solar-mass black hole at the hub of the neighboring spiral galaxy M31, or the Andromeda galaxy, the only galaxy outside the Milky Way visible to the naked eye and the only other giant galaxy in the local group This is a Hubble image of the 100-million-solar-mass… [Read more…]
October 31, 2011
…. in sky brightness due to distant radio sources Ashok K. Singal According to the cosmological principle, the Universe should appear isotropic, without any preferred directions, to an observer whom we may consider to be fixed in the co-moving co-ordinate system of the expanding Universe. Such an observer is stationary with respect to the average… [Read more…]
October 27, 2011
A new analysis of Hubble surveys, combined with simulations of galaxy interactions, reveals that the merger rate of galaxies over the last 8 billion to 9 billion years falls between the previous estimates. The galaxy merger rate is one of the fundamental measures of galaxy evolution, yielding clues to how galaxies bulked up over time… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
All observations in astronomy are based on light emitted from stars and galaxies and, according to the general theory of relativity, the light will be affected by gravity. At the same time all interpretations in astronomy are based on the correctness of the theory of relatively, but it has never before been possible to test… [Read more…]
September 15, 2011
Τhe supermassive black hole at the centre of a massive galaxy or galaxy cluster acts as a furnace, pumping heat into its surroundings. But astronomers have struggled to understand how a steady temperature is maintained throughout the whole galaxy when the black hole only appears to interact with nearby gas. Now, researchers in Canada and… [Read more…]
September 5, 2011
Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest and most massive regions. Collapse sets in to build up stars. Turbulence plays a dual role. On global scales it provides support, while… [Read more…]
August 31, 2011
George Contopoulos, Mirella Harsoula Abstract: We study the role of asymptotic curves in supporting the spiral structure of a N-body model simulating a barred spiral galaxy. Chaotic orbits with initial conditions on the unstable asymptotic curves of the main unstable periodic orbits follow the shape of the periodic orbits for an initial interval of time and… [Read more…]
August 30, 2011
First glimpse into birth of the Milky Way – For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world’s first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the… [Read more…]
August 30, 2011
The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii sees the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2903 almost face-on in this photograph. The central bulge glows yellow with older stars, while the spiral arms contain younger stars as determined by their blue color, and star formation regions of red. http://www.space.com/34-image-day.html
August 30, 2011
— After nine months of number-crunching on a powerful supercomputer, a beautiful spiral galaxy matching our own Milky Way emerged from a computer simulation of the physics involved in galaxy formation and evolution. The simulation by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich solves a longstanding… [Read more…]
August 22, 2011
A CSIRO study has shown why the lights are going out in the Universe. The Universe forms fewer stars than it used to, and a CSIRO study has now shown why: the galaxies are running out of gas. Dr Robert Braun (CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) and his colleagues used CSIRO’s Mopra radio telescope near… [Read more…]
August 12, 2011
VV 340, also known as Arp 302, provides a textbook example of colliding galaxies seen in the early stages of their interaction. The edge-on galaxy near the top of the image is VV 340 North and the face-on galaxy at the bottom of the image is VV 340 South. Millions of years later these two… [Read more…]
August 10, 2011
This new picture from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows NGC 3521, a spiral galaxy located about 35 million light years away in the constellation of Leo (The Lion). Spanning about 50 000 light-years, this spectacular object has a bright and compact nucleus, surrounded by richly detailed spiral structure. The most distinctive features of the bright… [Read more…]
July 27, 2011
The bright galaxies NGC 3628, M 65, and M 66 lie within the constellation Leo. Europe’s VLT Survey telescope’s 268-megapixel camera grabbed this wide angle image, expected to yield insight into dark matter and the odd behavior of galactic halos.
July 26, 2011
The universe was born spinning and continues to do so around a preferred axis – that is the bold conclusion of physicists in the US who have studied the rotation of more than 15,000 galaxies. While most cosmological theories have suggested that – on a large scale – the universe is the same in every… [Read more…]
July 19, 2011
These spectacular images of galaxies thousands of light years away would appear to have been taken using state-of-the-art equipment. In fact, they were captured by amateur astronomer Georgiy Suturin using just a camera and a home-made telescope. The extraordinary photos include the twinkling beauty of the Orion Nebula, and the Rosette Nebula – an object… [Read more…]
July 5, 2011
A galaxy known in astronomy circles as NGC 6744 is being hailed as the Milky Way’s galactic twin. Why? What does our home galaxy look like? Since we are located inside our galaxy, no one has ever been far enough away from it to see or photograph it. In this interesting video, Professor Merrifield, astronomer… [Read more…]
July 1, 2011
The way galaxies have been classified for decades has been questioned by an international team of astronomers. After revealing that two-thirds of local elliptical galaxies are actually fast-spinning discs, the team has suggested that the Hubble “tuning fork” – the long-standing method for classifying galaxies – may need retuning. Galaxies come in all shapes and… [Read more…]
July 1, 2011
Galaxies Near and Far Galaxies once thought of as voracious tigers are more like grazing cows, according to a new study using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers have discovered that galaxies in the distant, early universe continuously ingested their star-making fuel over long periods of time. This goes against previous theories that the galaxies devoured… [Read more…]
June 27, 2011
It’s one of the closest galaxies to Earth, but the Carina Dwarf Galaxy is so dim and diffuse that astronomers only discovered it in the 1970s. A companion galaxy of the Milky Way, this ball of stars shares features with both globular star clusters and much larger galaxies. Astronomers believe that dwarf spheroidal galaxies like… [Read more…]
June 21, 2011
In 1926, astronomer Edwin Hubble gave us our first basic galaxy classification scenario – the Hubble Sequence. Using photographic plates, Hubble derived a simplistic system based on three visually known structures: elipitical, spiral and lenticular. This sequence, when plotted out, gave the appearance of a common object and eventually became known as the “Hubble Tuning… [Read more…]
June 20, 2011
This gorgeous, oddly shaped galaxy is nearly 50 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, Seen edge-on, this spiral galaxy is known for its flattened disk and central bulge of stars, cut by silhouetted dust lanes. A recent deep color image of NGC 4013 below revealed a looping tidal stream of stars extending over… [Read more…]
June 16, 2011
A letter published in Nature today announces the first observations of developing black holes in the early Universe. The discovery answers a long-standing question in astronomy: how early on were black holes forming, and what were the earliest ones like? The observations required a clever technique which stretched the capabilities of modern instruments. We have now imaged… [Read more…]
June 16, 2011
What does our local universe look like? This spectacular image shows close to 50,000 galaxies in the nearby universe, which were detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light. The resulting image is an incredible tapestry of galaxies that helps scientists understand how the universe formed and evolved. It is the… [Read more…]
June 13, 2011
by Vanessa Thomas and Richard Webb Pristine spiral galaxies are some of the most stunning sights in the night sky – so perfect that they have cosmologists scratching their heads THEY are the pin-ups of the cosmos – elegant, luminous spiral swirls that whisper to us the word “galaxy”. It’s how we think our Milky Way would appear… [Read more…]
May 31, 2011
There was a time when most astronomers concluded that elliptical galaxies were a lot like their globular clusters – full of similarly evolved and aged stars. But not anymore. Thanks to the resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan were able to peer into the heart… [Read more…]
May 30, 2011
Spiral galaxies are one of the most captivating structures in astronomy, yet their nature is still not fully understood. Astronomers currently have two categories of theories that can explain this structure, depending on the environment of the galaxy, but a new study, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, suggests that one of these theories… [Read more…]
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May 18, 2012
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