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An Australian telescope used to broadcast live vision of man's first steps on the moon in 1969 has found hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way by using an innovative receiver that measures radio waves. Scientists at the Parkes telescope, 355 km (220 miles) west of Sydney, said they had detected 883 galaxies, a third of which had never been seen before. The findings were reported in the latest issue of Astronomical Journal under the title 'The Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey'. "Hundreds of new galaxies were discovered, using the same telescope that was used to broadcast...

KISSIMMEE, FLORIDA--Most, if not all, galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers surrounded by dense clouds of stars. Now, researchers have found one that seems to have lost almost its entire entourage. The team, which reported its find here today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, says it doesn't know what stripped the stars away. But it has put forward a tantalizing possibility: The object could be an extremely rare medium-sized black hole, which theorists have predicted but observers have never seen. The unusual black hole sits about 1 billion light-years from Earth in SDSS J1126+2944,...

They're big, they're bright, they're beautiful—and they shouldn't even exist, at least to our current astronomical knowledge: gargantuan spiral galaxies that make our giant Milky Way seem downright modest. Spirals are supposed to be small fry compared to the greatest giant ellipticals, which are football-shaped swarms of stars thought to be the universe’s biggest and brightest galaxies. But now a search across billions of light-years has snared a rare breed of "super spiral" galaxies that rival their giant elliptical peers in size and luminosity, raising questions over how such behemoths are born. "I was really surprised," says Patrick Ogle, an...

Imagine what our night sky would look like if its stellar density was a million times greater than it is now. Remarkably, such places actually exist: They’re called “Ultracompact Dwarfs,” and astronomers are calling them an entirely new kind of galaxy. Undergraduate astronomy students Michael Sandoval and Richard Vo from San José University discovered a pair of record-breaking compact galaxies buried within data contained in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These exotic objects are similar to ordinary globular clusters, but upwards of a hundred to a thousand times brighter. Advertisement Image: The two ultra-dense compact galaxies were discovered orbiting...

Astronomers find runaway galaxies 21 hours ago Enlarge This schematic illustrates the creation of a runaway galaxy. In the first panel, an "intruder" spiral galaxy approaches a galaxy cluster center, where a compact elliptical galaxy (cE) already revolves around a massive central elliptical galaxy. In the second panel, a close encounter occurs and the compact elliptical receives a gravitational kick from the intruder. In the third panel, the compact elliptical escapes the galaxy cluster while the intruder is devoured by the giant elliptical galaxy in the cluster center. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-astronomers-runaway-galaxies.html#jCp We know of about two dozen runaway stars,...

Astronomers searching the sky with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an odd little dwarf galaxy in our very own backyard -- a mere 7 million light years away.. ... Given that these isolated dwarf spheroidal galaxies are so hard to find, there could be many more of these fascinating galactic fossils just hanging out in the darkness of our own intergalactic neighborhood, just waiting to be found,

A star mystery solved? These newfound stars could help solve the so-called "photon underproduction crisis," which suggests that an extraordinary amount of ultraviolet light appears to be missing from the universe. The intergalactic stars could also help address what is known as the "missing baryon problem." Baryons are a class of subatomic particles that includes the protons and neutrons that make up the hearts of atoms inside normal matter. Theories of the formation and evolution of the universe predict there should be far more baryons than scientists currently see. The baryons that astronomers have accounted for in the local cosmic...

Breathtaking space pictures don't necessarily start snd end at APOD. There are countless astronomy sources that offer imagery of the Cosmos catalogued in different ways, like the National Optical Astronomy Obsevatory, NOAO. NOAO is the US national research & development center for ground-based night time astronomy. In particular, NOAO is enabling the development of the US optical-infrared (O/IR) System, an alliance of public and private observatories allied for excellence in scientific research, education and public outreach. Our core mission is to provide public access to qualified professional researchers via peer-review to forefront scientific capabilities on telescopes operated by NOAO as...

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...

U.S. astrophysicists report computer simulations that seem to resolve long-standing questions about the origin and life history of spiral arms in disk galaxies. The origin and fate of the spiral arms in disk galaxies have been debated by astrophysicists for decades, with two theories predominating. One holds that the arms come and go over time. A second and widely held theory is that the material that makes up the arms – stars, gas and dust – is affected by differences in gravity and jams up, like cars at rush hour, sustaining the arms for long periods. The new findings, accepted...

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...

Astroboffins have spotted a galaxy cluster that's breaking all the cosmic rules, including coming back to life to spawn stars at an enormous rate. The Phoenix cluster is spewing out the celestial bodies at the highest rate ever observed for the middle of a galaxy cluster; it's the most powerful producer of X-rays of any known cluster; it's one of the most massive of its kind; and the rate of hot gas cooling in the central regions is the largest ever observed. According to the scientists, the cluster is "experiencing a massive starburst" that's forming the equivalent of 740 Suns...

It seemed too good to be true: a superbright newfound galaxy cluster possibly more massive than any other known, forging fresh stars nearly a thousand times faster than normal.

The matter-eating beast at the center of the Milky Way may actually account for Earth's existence and habitabilityAdapted from Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos, by Caleb ScharfOur existence in this place, this microscopic corner of the cosmos, is fleeting. with utter disregard for our wants and needs, nature plays out its grand acts on scales of space and time that are truly hard to grasp. Perhaps all that we can look to for real solace is our endless capacity to ask questions and seek answers about the place we find ourselves...

Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today's cosmos, new research suggests. This "starbursting" activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious "dark matter" in early galaxies to confirm the link. The findings appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. ... Using the 12-metre Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope in Chile, an international team led by Ryan Hickox of Dartmouth College studied the way distant galaxies from...

The mystery behind the power source of the giant "Lyman-alpha blob," one of the largest single objects known in the universe, has finally been revealed by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory. Observations from ESO's Very Large Telescope have led to the conclusion that rare vast cloud of glowing gas from the earliest days of the universe must be powered by galaxies embedded within it. The results appear in the Aug. 18 issue of the journal Nature. Lyman-alpha blobs are huge gaseous structures emitting Lyman-alpha frequency light. Some of these are more than 400,000 light years across in size....

NASA has unveiled a flood of photos showing millions galaxies, stars and asteroids photographed by a prolific sky-mapping telescope that ended its mission earlier this year. For the first time, the space agency publicly released more than half of the 2.7 million images taken by its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope during its mission to map the entire sky. WISE launched in December 2009 and spent 14 months scanning the heavens in infrared light before shutting down this past February. The $320 million space telescope hunted for asteroids and comets, as well as more distant cosmic objects revealed by...

“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." -- Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, physicist, Cambridge University Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space. Great Wall: The most vast structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable...

Image of the Day: Galaxies Beyond Comprehension (and Seven-Trillion Dwarfs!)   ESA’s Herschel space telescope has discovered that previously unseen distant galaxies are responsible for a cosmic fog of infrared radiation. The galaxies are some of the faintest and furthest objects seen by Herschel, and open a new window on the birth of stars in the early Universe. Astronomers estimate that their are billions and billions of galaxies in the observable universe (as well as some seven trillion dwarf galaxies) . Here's the breakout of the visible universe within 14 billion light years: Superclusters in the visible universe =...

A Deep-Sky Look at Lensing by Paul Gilster on January 13, 2011 As we continue to investigate the parameters of the proposed FOCAL mission to the SunÂ’s gravitational lens, itÂ’s worth recalling how the idea of lensing has taken hold in recent decades. Einstein noted the possibilities of such lensing as far back as 1936, but it wasnÂ’t until 1964 that Sydney Liebes (Stanford University) worked out the mathematical theory, explaining how a galaxy between the Earth and an extremely distant object like a quasar could focus the latterÂ’s light in ways that should be detectable by astronomers. And...