Starbursts in dwarf galaxies last 100 times longer than astronomers thought

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 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 - 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 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 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 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An innovative sky survey has begun returning images that will be used to detect unprecedented numbers of powerful cosmic explosions called supernovae in distant galaxies, variable brightness stars in our own Milky Way, and reveal new classes of astronomical objects. All of these discoveries will stem from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines, in a new way, the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, and high-performance networking and computing, with rapid follow-up by telescopes around the globe, to open windows of discovery for astronomers.

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.

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 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team, led by astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, has discovered one of the coolest sub-stellar bodies ever found outside our own solar system. The stellar companion orbits the red dwarf star Wolf 940, some 40 light years from Earth.

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 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.

March 12th, 2009 MUNICH - Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have, in a way, prepared a unique "history book" of our Universe, with exceptional 3D views of distant galaxies, seen when the Universe was half its current age. By looking at this unique "history book" of our Universe, at an epoch when the Sun and the Earth did not yet exist, scientists hope to solve the puzzle of how galaxies formed in the remote past.