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Explanation: NGC 2685 is a confirmed polar ring galaxy - a rare type of galaxy with stars, gas and dust orbiting in rings perpendicular to the plane of a flat galactic disk. The bizarre configuration could be caused by the chance capture of material from another galaxy by a disk galaxy, with the captured debris strung out in a rotating ring. Still, observed properties of NGC 2685 suggest that the rotating ring structure is remarkably old and stable. In this sharp view of the peculiar system also known as Arp 336 or the Helix galaxy, the strange, perpendicular rings are...

does someone make an adapter/cable to go from the phone port to a thumbdrive I can take to it to a photo kiosk to print?

From the Beeb: An international team of astronomers has detected the most distant galaxy yet.The galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away and is helping scientists shed light on the period that immediately followed the Big Bang.It was found using the Hubble Space Telescope and its distance was then confirmed with the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii.The study is published in the journal Nature.Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the Universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago (its distance from Earth of 30 billion light-years is because...

Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but the Lone Star State's two research giants have teamed up to detect the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy ever found—one created within 700 million years after the Big Bang. The research is published in the most recent edition of the journal Nature. "It's exciting to know we're the first people in the world to see this," said Vithal Tilvi, a Texas A&M postdoctoral research associate and co-author of the paper, set to be available online after Oct. 24. "It raises interesting questions about the...

Explanation: This intriguing trio of galaxies is sometimes called the Draco Group, located in the northern constellation of (you guessed it) Draco. From left to right are edge-on spiral NGC 5981, elliptical galaxy NGC 5982, and face-on spiral NGC 5985 -- all within this single telescopic field of view spanning a little more than half the width of the full moon. While the group is far too small to be a galaxy cluster and has not been catalogued as a compact group, these galaxies all do lie roughly 100 million light-years from planet Earth. On close examination with spectrographs, the...

SEOUL, South Korea — Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker, is marching toward the next battlefield in its war against Apple. On Wednesday in Berlin, the Korean mega-corporation unveiled the long-anticipated Galaxy Gear, a wearable smartwatch set for release on Sept. 25. Launched a week before Apple reveals its hyped iWatch, Samsung is trying to dispel its image as a “fast follower,” a common label that it imitates other technologies in tried-and-tested markets, rather than innovating on its own. Whether it has effectively achieved that goal is a matter of debate. Most reviewers have doubted that smartwatches will revolutionize electronics...

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. unveiled a smartwatch on Wednesday that works as an accessory to its market-leading Galaxy smartphone, with a small screen offering basic functions like photos, hands-free calls and instant messaging. The world’s top handset maker hopes the Galaxy Gear will boost the appeal of its range of Android-powered smartphones, as it battles to maintain supremacy in the rapidly saturating high-end mobile market against arch rival Apple Inc. Its launch, timed to coincide with the start of the IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin, also signals the South Korean giant is more than just a fast follower...

Information about the Gear has been leaking out for weeks in bits and pieces. The Android-powered watch will have an AMOLED display, slightly curved to better fit your wrist. But nobody seems quite sure about the size and shape. Design patents filed in Korea (originally spotted by the blog SamMobile) show a futuristic look and elongated screen, but they may not reflect the shipping product. Samsung has admitted it has been working on the watch for a long time, so several versions may have been patented, and some may not be quite ready for release; one rumored model with a...

It’s a recurring theme in astronomy: observers see a blast of energy out in the cosmos, scratch their heads in confusion for a while, and finally uncover the existence of something entirely surprising and new. It happened with the quasars (now known to be gigantic burps from black holes swallowing hot gas), the pulsars (fast-spinning neutron stars sending out blips of radio noise hundreds of times every second), and even the Big Bang itself, first seen as a stream of microwaves slamming into Earth from all directions, nearly 14 billion years after the event itself.Now it may be happening again....

It's too soon to tell, but Samsung might have finally beaten Apple to become the United State's top smartphone maker, at least for now. A new report by the investment research firm Canaccord Genuity shows that Samsung beat Apple in US sales in May. In particular, Canaccord found the Galaxy S 4, Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S III sold more units combined than Apple's iPhone. It's important to be aware of the methodology Canaccord used to develop their findings. The study surveyed only the retail stores of carriers AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Apple Stores were not surveyed....

WASHINGTON – Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today. The heliosphere is a region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles, and which is thought to be enclosed, bubble-like, in the surrounding interstellar medium of gas and dust that pervades the Milky Way galaxy. On August 25, 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft measured drastic changes in radiation levels, more than 11 billion miles from the Sun. Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays...

A string of 13 dwarf galaxies are in orbit around the galaxy Andromeda. The galaxies are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and 30,000 light years thick, moving in synchonicity with each other. The phenomenon is unlike behaviour of other observed galaxies and suggests a hole in our knowledge of galaxy formation. A string of 13 dwarf galaxies in orbit around the massive galaxy Andromeda are not behaving as they should. The galaxies are spread across a flat plane more than one million light years wide and only 30,000 light years thick, moving...

Have our wishes been answered? Scientists have found an oil field which contains 200 times more hydrocarbons than there is water on the whole of the Earth. Time to wave peak oil goodbye forever … but before you do I should probably inform you of the tiny hiccup in any plan to develop this oil field. It is around 1,300 light years away. The scientists work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and using the 30m-telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy they discovered a vast cloud of hydrocarbons within the Horse Head Nebula galaxy in the Orion constellation.

A new galaxy class has been identified using observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Gemini South telescope, and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Nicknamed “green bean galaxies” because of their unusual appearance, these galaxies glow in the intense light emitted from the surroundings of monster black holes and are amongst the rarest objects in the Universe. Many galaxies have a giant black hole at their center that causes the gas around it to glow. However, in the case of green bean galaxies, the entire galaxy is glowing, not just the centre. These new observations reveal the largest and brightest...

Hubble observations of a speedy galaxy weigh on the Milky Way and indicate that our galaxy is at least a trillion times as massive as the sunMilky Way GREAT GALAXY: The Milky Way maintains a fleet of some two dozen satellite galaxies whose motions help reveal its mass. Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team Although scientists know the masses of the sun and Earth, it's a different story for the galaxy. Mass estimates range widely: At the low end, some studies find that the galaxy is several hundred billion times as massive as the sun whereas the largest values exceed two trillion...

Explanation: Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies. Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled...

TOKYO — A Japanese court on Friday rejected patent claims made by Apple against Samsung, a victory for the company after its crushing defeat in the United States last week and a reminder of the global scope of the patent war between the two technology giants. While Apple prevailed over Samsung in the United States, winning an award of $1 billion in damages from a federal jury, the two companies remain neck-and-neck in legal disputes in almost a dozen countries. A judge in South Korea, where Samsung is based, for example, handed down a split decision in a patent case...

The jury in Apple vs. Samsung, doubtlessly eager to be out by the weekend, rushed their way through the approximately 26 pages and 55 questions of their instructions and decided that Samsung did indeed violate some of Apple's patents just over a billion bucks. Impressive? Not really. This is not the end. This verdict doesn't even matter in the long run. This was just another clash. This case was going to be appealed, no matter who won, the second it started. This is just one more encounter on the case's way to the Supreme Court. Samsung has lost this skirmish,...

Apple scored a big victory in its smartphone patent infringement case vs. Samsung late Friday afternoon as a jury awarded the victor $1.05 billion in damages. But does the closely watched verdict mean anything to consumers? No–at least not for now. Why? * This case no doubt will be appealed. That means little is likely to change anytime soon, at least until Apple files for injunctions against the Samsung products involved. And those are by no means all of Samsung’s products, let alone other Android smartphones. You won’t have to surrender your Samsung smartphones or tablets or worry that some...