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An international team of astronomers has discovered within the heart of a nearby spiral galaxy a quasar whose light spectrum indicates that it is billions of light years away. The finding poses a cosmic puzzle: How could a galaxy 300 million light years away contain a stellar object several billion light years away? The team’s findings, which were presented today in San Diego at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society and which will appear in the February 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, raise a fundamental problem for astronomers who had long assumed that the “high redshifts” in...

Overview We have written a lot about the red shift of the last decade, the trend toward the Republican party at every level of government. Today’s question is: if you were running the DNC, where would you try to find the votes you need to win. It’s a hard task, given the location of your voters, the growth trends of Republican areas, and the structural problems of the Democratic party. Here are some of the issues in play. The 3 - 4 million Democrats who turned to the dark side John Podhoretz put the figure at 3.6 million; Roger Simon...

Measurements of 11 exploding stars spread throughout the visible universe made by the Hubble Space Telescope confirm earlier, ground-based studies which produced the first evidence that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an increasing rate. The new study, which has been posted online HERE and will soon appear in the Astrophysical Journal, also provides some tantalizing new insights into the nature of the mysterious repulsive force, dubbed dark energy, that appears to be propelling this run-away expansion. "As far as the ultimate fate of the universe goes, the most straightforward conclusion is that over the next few...

In earlier articles, we discussed the nature of time and the fallacy of linear and absolute time concepts. We now know that time is a physical property and varies with respect to mass, acceleration, and gravity.1 Time is tied to our concepts of the curvature of space-time, and the velocity of light. The velocity of light is, in fact, a parameter which appears to affect almost every aspect of both cosmological physics on the large scale, as well as quantum physics in the particle scale. It is, of course, considered to be the fundamental constant of physics. Historical Perspective The...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 February 9 COBE Dipole: Speeding Through the Universe Credit: DMR, COBE, NASA, Four-Year Sky Map Explanation: Our Earth is not at rest. The Earth moves around the Sun. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy orbits in the Local Group of Galaxies. The Local Group falls toward the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. But these speeds are less than the speed...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 January 24 Seyfert's Sextet Credit: J. English (U. Manitoba), C. Palma (PSU), et al., NASA Explanation: Known as Seyfert's Sextet, this intriguing group of galaxies lies in the head portion of the split constellation Serpens. The sextet actually contains only four interacting galaxies, though. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background and appears only by...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 7 The Galaxy and the Quasar Credit: R. Knacke (Penn State Erie) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA Explanation: Is the galaxy in the center connected to the quasar on the upper right? Disagreements about systems like this have raged for decades and have been used to challenge the foundations of modern cosmology. Some believe that the quasar Markarian 205 was recently ejected from galaxy NGC...

Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope have discovered an exploding galaxy at the edge of the known universe. The team, led by astronomers from Tohoku University in Japan, say the galaxy rapidly formed stars when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Images and spectra from the Subaru and Keck telescopes reveal that the galaxy has a high-speed outflow of hydrogen gas believed to be caused by a massive burst of star formation. The galaxy is more than 14 billion light years from Earth, and is currently the most distant galaxy known to harbor such a phenomenon. Studying such...

Is the Universe older than expected? 10 July 2002 An analysis of 13.5 thousand million-year-old X-rays, captured by ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, has shown that either the Universe may be older than astronomers had thought or that mysterious, undiscovered ‘iron factories’ litter the early Universe. ESA's Norbert Schartel and colleagues from the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik,Germany, found more iron than anyone thought possible in the extremely distant celestial object, APM 8279+5255. The object is a quasar, that is, a young galaxy containing an incredibly bright central region, caused by gas falling into a giant black hole. APM 8279+5255 is 13.5...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 March 19 Breaking Distant Light Credit: VIMOS, VLT, ESO Explanation: In the distant universe, time appears to run slow. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshifted), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe. Above, the light from distant galaxies has been broken up into its constituent colors (spectra), allowing astronomers to measure the...