Tag: Galaxies

The purpose of the anti and dark matter detective AMS is to help scientists to better understand fundamental issues on the origin and structure of the Universe by observing antimatter and dark matter. As a by-product, AMS will gather a lot of other information from cosmic radiation sources on stars and galaxies millions of light years from our home galaxy.

New look at x-ray data reveals monsters at hearts of first galaxies.

Long gazes into deep space have turned up something huge: Signs of supermassive black holes devouring matter at the hearts of the universe's first galaxies.

Theorists had suspected that such enormous black holes existed just a billion years after the big bang, since most if not all of mature large galaxies have the matter-gobbling monsters at their centers.

Giant Black HolesFrom the NASA Swift team, watch full screen 1080p! Most large galaxies contain a giant central black hole. In an active galaxy, matter falling toward the supermassive black hole powers high-energy emissions so intense that two classes of active galaxies, quasars and blazars, rank as the most luminous objects in the universe.

There is a big gap in our observations from the CMB to the first galaxies almost a billion years later.
The James Webb Space Telescope will help close that gap by looking for the first stars in the infrared.

The first stars were initially very bright in the ultra-violet, and after 12 billion or so years, that light has been redshifted to the IR.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2010) Galaxy morphology, or the study of the shapes and formation of galaxies, is a critical and much-debated topic in astronomy. An important tool for this is the Hubble sequence or Hubble tuning-fork diagram [1], a classification scheme invented in 1926 by the same Edwin Hubble in whose honour the space telescope is named.

A team of European astronomers led by Franחois Hammer of the Observatoire de Paris has, for the first time, completed a demographic census of galaxy types at two different points in the Universe's history -- in effect, creating two Hubble sequences -- that help explain how galaxies form. In this survey, researchers sampled 116 local galaxies and 148 distant galaxies.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.

Their findings are published in December's first issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

These super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies are called active galactic nuclei. For the first time, the team observed a quasar with an active galactic nucleus, as part of the group of four, which is located more than a billion light years from Earth. The scientists used the two Keck telescopes on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These are the largest optical/infrared telescopes in the world.

Veteran astronomer Ned Wright is already considered pretty smart. But soon hell be getting wise.

Thats WISE as in Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, the NASA spacecraft set for launch on December 11 that will provide the most comprehensive examination of the sky ever recorded in infrared radiation. Wright, of the University of California, Los Angeles, leads the $320 million robotic mission, which for at least nine months will map the sky in four bands of infrared wavelengths. These wavelengths, ranging from 3.3 micrometers to 23 micrometers, are absorbed by Earths atmosphere and cant be seen from the ground.

Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.

Analyses of infrared images of these galaxies captured in late August and early September with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 suggest there were fewer bright galaxies early in cosmic history and those galaxies formed stars at an unexpectedly low rate.