Half of Universe’s starlight comes from young star-forming galaxies

September 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has witnessed a clump of planet-forming material around a young star. Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust.

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.

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 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new theory by scientists says that our Milky Way galaxy survived intense heat generated by the "ignition" of the Universe about half-a-billion years after the Big Bang, because it was already immersed in a large clump of dark matter that trapped gases inside it. Tiny galaxies, inside small clumps of dark matter, were blasted away by the heat that reached approximate temperatures of between 20,000 and 100,000 degrees centigrade, according to the scientists, including experts at Japan's University of Tsukuba.

June 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New data obtained from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes has pinpointed the source of "cosmic blobs" as growing supermassive black holes. This discovery helps resolve the true nature of gigantic blobs of gas observed around very young galaxies.

June 24th, 2009 Telescope finds space blobs are pubescent galaxiesWASHINGTON — Mysterious space blobs aren't infant galaxies as astronomers once thought. Scientists say they mostly consist of galaxies going through puberty, all hot and bothered.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has found most dark gamma-ray bursts occur in normal galaxies detectable by large, ground-based optical telescopes. Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away.

May 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A telescope designed by a University of Miami physicist and an international team of collaborators has produced the clearest images of starburst galaxies, revealing a new picture of the universe in its early stages. The innovative new telescope, called BLAST (Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope), was built by an international research team, which included Joshua Gundersen, University of Miami professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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 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.

April 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers has found a sample of massive galaxies with properties that suggest they may have formed relatively recently, a discovery that poses challenge to galaxy formation theories. This runs counter to the widely-held belief that massive, luminous galaxies (like our own Milky Way Galaxy) began their formation and evolution shortly after the Big Bang, some 13 billion years ago.

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.