News tagged with galaxy formation

Black holes and star formation

(PhysOrg.com) -- It has long been recognized that galaxy mergers or even close interactions can play a vital role in shaping the morphology of galaxies. One way they can do so, it is thought, is by triggering ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 09, 2012 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (7) | comments 6 | with audio podcast

Do black holes help stars form?

(PhysOrg.com) -- The center of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 03, 2012 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (6) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Classic portrait of a barred spiral galaxy

(PhysOrg.com) -- The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073, which is found in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Feb 03, 2012 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (7) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

The wild early lives of today's most massive galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the APEX telescope, a team of astronomers has found the strongest link so far between the most powerful bursts of star formation in the early Universe, and the most massive galaxies ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 25, 2012 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (5) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

ALMA early science result reveals starving galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers using the partially completed ALMA observatory have found compelling evidence for how star-forming galaxies evolve into 'red and dead' elliptical galaxies, catching a large group ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 11, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Herschel and Spitzer see nearby galaxies' stardust

(PhysOrg.com) -- The cold dust that builds blazing stars is revealed in new images that combine observations from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions; ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 10, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0

A universal law for star formation

(PhysOrg.com) -- Star formation is studied by astronomers not only because it produces new stars and planetary systems. It also generates copious amounts of ultraviolet light that heats dust which in turn ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 09, 2012 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Image: Active Galaxy Centaurus A

(PhysOrg.com) -- Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 04, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 0

A 'Rose' made of galaxies

(PhysOrg.com) -- In celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment in April 2011, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute pointed Hubble's eye to an especially ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 21, 2011 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (8) | comments 0

How can growing galaxies stay silent?

Beginning around 2005, astronomers began discovering the presence of very large galaxies at a distance of around 10 billion lightyears. But while these galaxies were large, they didn’t appear to have ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 19, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 1

Hubble racks up 10,000 science papers

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has passed another milestone in its 21 years of exploration: the 10,000th refereed science paper has been published. This makes Hubble one of the most prolific ...

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Dec 07, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0

Researcher peers into universe's ancient past to better know how stars form

(PhysOrg.com) -- It takes light from our closest star, the Sun, about eight minutes to reach Earth. But light that leaves stars in distant galaxies takes a lot more time to reach our planet — billions of years more.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 07, 2011 | popularity 4 / 5 (1) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Astronomers look to neighboring galaxy for star formation insight

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.

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 30, 2011 | popularity not rated yet | comments 3 | with audio podcast

NASA to support IU astronomer's quest to develop largest-ever star formation database

(PhysOrg.com) -- Samir Salim has a lot of space to fit into a new NASA-funded database; about 11 million galaxies of it would be a ballpark estimate based on the number of galaxies for which distances can be estimated to ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 21, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0

A serendipitous gravitational lens

(PhysOrg.com) -- The path traveled by a light beam will bend in the presence of matter. This remarkable prediction, reached by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, was confirmed by observations of ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Nov 21, 2011 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (6) | comments 3 | with audio podcast

Galaxy formation and evolution

The study of galaxy formation and evolution is concerned with the processes that formed a heterogeneous universe from a homogeneous beginning, the formation of the first galaxies, the way galaxies change over time, and the processes that have generated the variety of structures observed in nearby galaxies. It is one of the most active research areas in astrophysics.

Galaxy formation is believed to occur, from structure formation theories, as a result of tiny quantum fluctuations in the aftermath of the Big Bang. It is widely accepted that galaxy evolution occurs within the framework of a Λ Cold Dark Matter cosmology; that is to say that clustering and merging is how galaxies gain in mass, and can also determine their shape and structure.

For more information about Galaxy formation and evolution, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.