Nearby spiral galaxy resembles our own Milky Way, say astronomers

September 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Swift satellite has acquired the highest-resolution view of a neighboring spiral galaxy ever attained in the ultraviolet. The galaxy, known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is the largest and closest spiral galaxy to our own.

September 4th, 2009 TORONTO - Andromeda and Triangulum, the two galaxies closest to our own, collided two to three billion years ago, changing the galactic structure, according to evidence unearthed by astronomers. The collision appears to have plucked millions of stars from the Triangulum disk to form a faint stream visible in the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) data, says Larry Widrow, professor of physics and Astronomy at Queen's University.

September 2nd, 2009 No strain for Andromeda: Galaxy is cosmic cannibalWASHINGTON — Our nearest major galactic neighbor is a cosmic cannibal. And it's heading this way eventually.

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 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center. The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away.

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.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable "dark matter" believed to make up much of the mass of the universe. In two separate scientific papers, the astrophysicists show that this distribution of gamma rays can be explained by the way "antimatter positrons" from the radioactive decay of elements, created by massive star explosions in the galaxy, propagate through the galaxy.

July 2nd, 2009 BERLIN - Astronomers have unveiled the largest map of cold cosmic dust, which are peppered in the inner regions of the Milky Way galaxy, and are the potential birthplaces of new stars. Made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this will prove an invaluable map for observations made with the forthcoming ALMA telescope, as well as the recently launched ESA Herschel space telescope.

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 15th, 2009 LONDON - A team of astronomers has claimed to have seen hints of the first planet to be spotted outside the Milky Way galaxy, in the Andromeda galaxy. According to a report by BBC News, the team, which has made the finding, is made up of researchers from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy and collaborators in Switzerland, Spain, and Russia.

June 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found that stars of a recently discovered type, dubbed 'ultracool subdwarfs', take some pretty wild rides as they orbit around the Milky Way, following paths that are very different from those of typical stars. The finding, by Adam Burgasser and John Bochanski of MIT, clarifies the origins of these peculiar, faint stars, and may provide new details on the types of stars the Milky Way has acquired from other galaxies.

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.