Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today. The results will be published in the August 6, 2009 issue of the journal Nature, with a companion paper in the Astrophysical Journal.
Halo and Galaxy Formation Histories from the Millennium Simulation
Public release of a VO-oriented and SQL-queryable database for studying the evolution of galaxies in the ΛCDM cosmogony
New results from digital sky surveys highlight more inconsistencies in our understanding of early galaxies, which, in contrast to today's galaxies, were compact and rapidly moving.
Just days after NASA released the first cosmic dreamscapes taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope three teams of astronomers have used the rejuvenated observatory to find what appears to be a bounty of the most distant galaxies known.
"SDSS-III's newest release is Data Release 10 (DR10). DR10 contains the first spectra of the APO Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), as well as additional sky coverage and better galaxy parameter estimates from BOSS."
@Spatzlhirn
"Afrikanische Mistkäfer (Scarabaeus satyrus) orientieren sich nicht nur an der Sonne, dem Mond und der Polarisation des Tageslichtes. Anders als viele andere Insekten nutzen sie für die Navigation offenbar auch die Sterne.
Genau genommen ist es die Milchstraße - jener Teil unserer Galaxie, der als helles Band am nächtlichen Himmel zu sehen ist - um in mondlosen Nächten ihren Weg zu finden.
Das berichten Marie Dacke von der Universität Lund und ihre Kollegen aus Schweden und Südafrika im Fachjournal Current Biology (online)."