Discovery of recently formed galaxies poses challenge to galaxy formation theories

September 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii has discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant supermassive black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.

August 7th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers has measured the motions of stars in a very distant galaxy for the first time and discovered they are whizzing around at astonishingly high speeds. A team from Yale University, UK, spent an unprecedented 29 hours observing the galaxy with one of the largest telescopes on Earth-the Gemini South Telescope in Chile-to collect enough light to determine how fast its stars are moving.

August 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today.

July 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In an interesting new research, astronomers have determined that dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which contain few stars relative to their total mass, are formed by indulging in a cosmic dance. Dwarf spheroidal galaxies appear to be made mostly of dark matter - a mysterious substance detectable only by its gravitational influence, which outweighs normal matter by a factor of five to one in the universe as a whole.

July 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the "Green Peas", which could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. The galaxies were discovered with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo.

July 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A scientist is using a new instrument at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory to dissect nearby galaxies to learn how stars form, and in the process, generating a flood of new information that will benefit other scientists' work. The scientist in question is University of Texas at Austin graduate student Guillermo A.

July 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers at the Chandra X-ray Observatory have spotted a galaxy collision in action, with one galaxy passing through the core of other galaxies at almost 2 million miles per hour. The image obtained is of Stephan's Quintet, a compact group of galaxies discovered about 130 years ago and located about 280 million light years from Earth.

June 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have announced the discovery of new tidal debris stripped away from colliding galaxies. New debris images are of special interest since they show the full history of galaxy collisions and resultant starburst activities, which are important in 'growing' galaxies in the early Universe.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have used new computer modeling techniques to discover that the black hole at the heart of M87, one the largest nearby giant galaxies, is two to three times more massive than previously thought. The astronomers were Karl Gebhardt from the University of Texas at Austin and Jens Thomas from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

May 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - An analysis of archival images of small, or dwarf, galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests that starbursts, intense regions of star formation, sweep across the whole galaxy and last 100 times longer than astronomers thought. The longer duration may affect how dwarf galaxies change over time, and therefore may shed light on galaxy evolution.

April 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New calculations by scientists suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. The calculations have been made by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

April 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have discovered large galaxies that have not changed much in size for the last 9 billion years, which suggests these cosmic giants were born 6-7 billion years earlier than expected. The most popular model for galaxy formation is a bottom-up or hierarchical model in which small galaxies gradually develop into larger ones over a long period of time.

April 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - The Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 19th anniversary by detecting a peculiar galactic system that contains several galaxies, along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years. Known as Arp 194, the northern (upper) component of the system of galaxies appears as a haphazard collection of dusty spiral arms, bright blue star-forming regions, and at least two galaxy nuclei that appear to be connected and in the early stages of merging.

March 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope offers a rare view of an imminent collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with millions of times the mass of the sun. The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strong new line of evidence that halos of dark matter are embedded around small galaxies. Looking into the turbulent center of the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster, Hubble discovered a large population of small galaxies that have remained intact while larger galaxies around them are being ripped apart by the gravitational tug of other galaxies.