Scientist uses new instrument to dissect nearby galaxies to learn how stars form

September 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA scientists Wednesday unveiled the first images taken by a revamped Hubble telescope, providing even crisper pictures of distant stars and galaxies. The colourful images provide a taste of the Hubble's new capability after a servicing mission in May that installed new instruments and repaired broken ones that had hampered the world's most famous telescope.

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 3rd, 2009 LONDON - A new research has shown that the vast Andromeda galaxy appears to have expanded by cannibalizing on stars from other galaxies. According to a report by BBC News, when an international team of scientists mapped Andromeda, they discovered stars that they said were "remnants of dwarf galaxies".

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 11th, 2009 PARIS - The Herschel Space Observatory has carried out the first test observations with all its instruments, revealing spectacular results, finding water and carbon and revealing dozens of distant galaxies. These observations show that Herschel's instruments are working beyond expectations.

July 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of researchers led by a UC (University of California) Riverside astronomer has completed the largest ever survey designed to find very distant clusters of galaxies. Named the Spitzer Adaptation of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey, "SpARCS" detects galaxy clusters using deep ground-based optical observations from the CTIO 4m and CFHT 3.6m telescopes, combined with Spitzer Space Telescope infrared observations.

June 10th, 2009 LONDON - Astronomers have detected evidence of a new clutch of tiny, dense galaxies, dubbed 'cosmic cannonballs', which thrived in the early Universe, and are nowhere to be seen today. According to a report in New Scientist, the ultra-dense galaxies, which were already full of old stars when the universe was less than 3 billion years old, were first reported in 2008.

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 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.

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.