Stars in early galaxies whizzed around at astonishingly high speeds

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 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 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 - 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.