— NASA's Hubble confirms that galaxies are the ultimate recyclers — New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are expanding astronomers' understanding of the ways in which galaxies continuously recycle immense volumes of hydrogen gas and heavy…
— Frozen comet had a watery past, University of Arizona scientists find — For the first time, scientists have found convincing evidence for the presence of liquid water in a comet, shattering the current paradigm that comets never get warm enough to melt…
— Sugar-grain sized meteorites rocked the climates of early Earth and Mars — Bombardments of 'micro-meteorites' on Earth and Mars four billion years ago may have caused the planets' climates to cool dramatically, hampering their ability to support life, according…
— Astrophysicist: White dwarfs could be fertile ground for other Earths — Planet hunters have found hundreds of planets outside the solar system in the last decade, though it is unclear whether even one might be habitable. But it could be that the best place…
— Integral spots matter a millisecond from doom — ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has spotted extremely hot matter just a millisecond before it plunges into the oblivion of a black hole. But is it really doomed? These unique observations…
— MESSENGER spacecraft to swing into orbit around Mercury — At 8:45 p.m. EDT on March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute manoeuvre that will place it into orbit around Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and…
— Baby stars born to 'napping' parents — Cardiff University astronomers believe that a young star's long 'napping' could trigger the formation of a second generation of smaller stars and planets orbiting around it…
— Oldest objects in solar system indicate a turbulent beginning — Scientists have found that calcium, aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs), some of the oldest objects in the solar system, formed far away from our sun and then later fell back into the…
— Oxygen isotope analysis tells of the wandering life of a dust grain 4.5 billion years ago — Scientists have performed a micro-probe analysis of the core and outer layers of a pea-sized piece of a meteorite some 4.57 billion years old to reconstruct the history of its formation,…
Galaxies' glory days revealed
Astronomers have experienced the galactic equivalent of discovering pictures of a mild-mannered grandmother partying as a wild youth. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal the early 'wild' days of galaxy clusters - a time when the galaxies were bursting with new stars.
What is particularly striking is the fact that the stellar birth rate is higher in the cluster's centre than at its edges - the exact opposite of what happens in our local portion of the universe, where the cores of galaxy clusters are known to be galactic graveyards.
The discovery, made by an international team of researchers led by Kim-Vy Tran of Texas A and M University, College Station, could ultimately reveal more about how such massive galaxies form.
Tran and her team spent the past four months analysing images taken by Spitzer, essentially looking back in time nearly 10 billion years at a distant galaxy cluster known as CLG J02182-05102. Mere months after first discovering the cluster and the fact that it is shockingly 'modern' in its appearance and size for its age, the team was able to determine that the galaxy cluster produces hundreds to thousands of new stars every year. That is a far higher birth rate than that of galaxies relatively near to us.
'We have revealed the missing link between the active galaxies and the quiescent behemoths that live in the local universe,' said Tran.
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