galaxies

NASA today released a new, panoramic mosaic of the Milky Way, and frankly, it rivals anything snapped during the Hubble's early days. Taken by the Chandra X-ray space telescope, the picture shows the massive energy released by neutron stars and black holes more vividly than any previous picture.

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130 years ago, astronomers discovered Stephan's Quintent--a compact group of galaxies 280 million light years from Earth. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the X-rays generated by the interstellar collision, as one of the galaxies is sucked through the center of the group at 2 million miles per hour.

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For centuries, the creation of the universe has loomed large in human thought, cropping up in everything from ancient folklore to modern scientific theories. A newly-developed nano-sized device, 100 times smaller than the thickness of human hair and capable of detecting infrared light that dates back to the "big bang," could soon give us more food for thought concerning the galaxy's formation 14 billion years ago.

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Considering the birth rate, astronomers might have named this the Rabbit Galaxy. According to a new paper in today’s issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered a galaxy that birthed stars 400 times faster than our Milky Way, overturning previously held ideas about the formation of giant galaxies

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Granted, it might not seem like such a big deal when astronomers find some of the missing mass in the universe, since there's very little that isn't missing. Roughly 95 percent of the cosmos is either dark matter or dark energy. About five percent of the universe is made up of the normal mass we're familiar with—baryonic matter. Yet by adding up the known stars and galaxies and gas, astronomers have only accounted for about half of that five percent.

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Not much in science is more of a mind-bender than thinking about the size and fate of the known universe (except for quantum mechanics and string theory, which also has a lot to do with the size and fate of the universe, albeit on the opposite end of the size spectrum). When we first developed theories about the universe, the model which resulted depicted all of space as static and unchanging, infinite in depth in any direction. Then Einstein posited general relativity and suddenly a whole host of universes were theoretically possible: static, dynamic, infinite, and finite.

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Today marks the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and to celebrate, NASA has released a collection of 59 new Hubble images (under the fantastic title "Galxies Gone Wild!") that present galaxies in all of their volatile wonder.

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Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays carry more energy than any known particles in the universe, so we should probably all take it as good news that scientists have confirmed that they don't originate in our cosmic neighborhood. In fact, the majority of these rays—which are mostly hydrogen and helium—lose most of their juice on their way towards Earth because they interact with the cosmic microwave background radiation, the energetic leftover of the Big Bang.

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