Strange new 'species' of ultra-red galaxy discovered

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy."We've had to...

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Astronomers look to neighboring galaxy for star formation insight

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — An international team of astronomers has mapped in detail the star-birthing regions of the nearest star-forming galaxy to our own, a step toward understanding the conditions surrounding star creation.Led by University of Illinois astronomy professor Tony Wong, the researchers published their findings in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a popular galaxy among astronomers both for its nearness to our...

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Astronomers pin down galaxy collision rates by comparing Hubble images to supercomputer simulations

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — A new analysis of images from the Hubble Space Telescope combined with supercomputer simulations of galaxy collisions has cleared up years of confusion about the rate at which smaller galaxies merge to form bigger ones. This paper, led by Jennifer Lotz of Space Telescope Science Institute, is about to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.Galaxies grow mostly by acquiring small amounts of matter from their surroundings. But occasionally galaxies merge with other...

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Astronomers pin down galaxy collision rate with Hubble data

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — A new analysis of Hubble surveys, combined with simulations of galaxy interactions, reveals that the merger rate of galaxies over the last 8 billion to 9 billion years falls between the previous estimates.The galaxy merger rate is one of the fundamental measures of galaxy evolution, yielding clues to how galaxies bulked up over time through encounters with other galaxies. And yet, a huge discrepancy exists over how often galaxies coalesced in the past. Measurements...

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