Browse by Tags

All Tags » galaxies   (RSS)
20 July 2010
WISE Mission Completes All-sky Infrared Survey
If you take a lot of digital pictures, you're probably familiar with the frustration of keeping track of dozens of files, and always running out of hard drive space to store them. Well, the scientists and engineers on NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have no pity for you. Their spacecraft just finished photographing [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
23 June 2010
Cosmologists Provide Closest Measure of Elusive Neutrino
Cosmologists – and not particle physicists — could be the ones who finally measure the mass of the elusive neutrino particle. A group of cosmologists have made their most accurate measurement yet of the mass of these mysterious so-called "ghost particles." They didn't use a giant particle detector but used data from the largest survey [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
17 June 2010
Zoom into a New VISTA of the Sculptor Galaxy
The new VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) has captured a great new image of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253), and this video allows you to zoom in for a closer look. The sequence starts with a wide view of the southern sky far [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
26 May 2010
Galaxies Like Grains of Sand in New Herschel Image
Wow. Just wow. Each of the colored dots in this new image from the Herschel telescope is a galaxy containing billions of stars. These are distant luminous infrared galaxies, and appear as they did 10–12 billion years ago, packed together like grains of sand on a beach, forming large clusters of galaxies [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
19 May 2010
Hail to His Spiralness, M83
ESO released a beautiful image today of M83, a classic spiral galaxy. The image was taken by the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The picture shows the galaxy in infrared light and the combination of the huge mirror of the VLT, the large field of [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments
Filed under: , , ,
 
10 May 2010
Team Finds Most-Distant Galaxy Cluster Ever Seen
Like a location from Star Wars, this galaxy cluster is far, far away and with origins a long, long time ago. With the ungainly name of SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510, this cluster is actually the most distant cluster of galaxies ever seen. It is a whopping 9.6 billion light years away, and X-ray and infrared observations [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
05 May 2010
New Image Reveals Thousands of Galaxies in Abell 315
In an image akin to the Hubble Deep Field, ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile stared at a patch of sky about as big as a full Moon and observed thousands of distant galaxies. The Wide Field Imager on ESO's 2.2 meter telescope zeroed in on a large group of galaxies that are part of [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
25 April 2010
GOODS, Under Astronomers' AEGIS, Produce GEMS
No, not really (but I got all three key words into the title in a way that sorta makes sense). Astronomers, like most scientists, just love acronyms; unfortunately, like most acronyms, on their own the ones astronomers use make no sense to non-astronomers. And sometimes not even when written in full: GOODS = Great Observatories Origins Survey; OK [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
22 April 2010
Click on Hubble: Galaxy Zoo Now Includes HST Images
The Hubble Space Telescope is 20 years old on Saturday and, to mark this anniversary, all the world's space and astronomy fans have a chance to become part of the Hubble team. As part of the birthday celebrations NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute and the online astronomy project Galaxy Zoo are making some 200,000 Hubble images [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
08 April 2010
Hubble Captures Distorted Beauty of M66
This isn't your basic spiral galaxy, but perhaps it used to be! Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys has captured this beautiful view of the biggest child of the Leo Triplet, M66. Its asymmetric spiral arms and an apparently displaced core was mostly likely caused by the gravitational pull of the other two members [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments
Filed under: , ,
 
05 April 2010
Stunning Science Using Nature's Telescope
Einstein started it all, back in 1915. Eddington picked up the ball and ran with it, in 1919. And in the last decade or so astronomers have used a MACHO to OLGE CASTLES … yes, I'm talking about gravitational lensing. Now LABOCA and SABOCA are getting into the act, using Einstein's theory of general relativity to cast a [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
04 April 2010
Andromeda's Double Nucleus – Explained at Last?
In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope snapped a close-up of the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy, M31, and found that it is double. In the 15+ years since, dozens of papers have been written about it, with titles like The stellar population of the decoupled nucleus in M 31, Accretion Processes in the Nucleus of M31, [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
03 April 2010
Magnetic Fields in Spiral Galaxies – Explained at Last?
That spiral galaxies have magnetic fields has been known for well over half a century (and predictions that they should exist preceded discovery by several years), and some galaxies' magnetic fields have been mapped in great detail. But how did these magnetic fields come to have the characteristics we observe them to have? And how do [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
24 March 2010
Astronomers Find 90% More Universe!
Astronomers have long known that many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90% of their targets, but they didn't know why. Now, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. This was found with an extremely deep survey using two of [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments
Filed under: , , ,
 
21 March 2010
Galaxies in Early Universe Experienced "Growth Spurt"
Looking back in time – and through a gravitational lens – astronomers found evidence that galaxies in the early Universe went through a "growth spurt" of rapid and vigorous star formation. A distant galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102 is making new stars 250 times faster than the Milky Way. Due to the [...]
Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
0 Comments  
More Posts Next page »