Astrophile: Blobby old galaxy boasts hidden arms - space - 27 September 2012. Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse Object: The giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus ADistance: About 12 million light years Centaurus A was facing a midlife crisis. The giant elliptical galaxy's brightest stars were old and puffy, and it had nearly run out of gas needed to create new ones. The galaxy was just a featureless blob that had lost its sparkle. Then a chance encounter allowed boring old Centaurus A to have a fling with a younger, smaller galaxy. The event revived the elder partner, triggering a fresh round of star birth and creating one of its most notable features: a dark dust lane along its middle.
In a surprise twist, new observations show the cosmic hanky-panky also caused Centaurus A to sprout two spiral arms – something no other elliptical galaxy is known to have. Shocking revelation By blocking visible light, the dust also conceals the intimacies of the galaxy's steamy affair. Gassy tendrils. Most distant galaxy hails from mysterious cosmic dawn - space - 19 September 2012. Using a cosmic magnifying glass, astronomers have uncovered the best contender yet for the most distant known galaxy – an object from which light began travelling towards us 13.2 billion years ago. The find adds a precious piece to the largely unsolved puzzle of what the universe looked like just a few hundred million years after the big bang.
Observations show that when the cosmos was 400,000 years old it was a sea of atoms. By the time it was a billion years old, it was teeming with galaxies. Figuring out what happened in the intervening years is difficult because objects from so long ago are very faint when viewed from Earth. Dubbed MACS 1149-JD, the new galaxy was spotted using a technique called gravitational lensing.
Wei Zheng of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to scrutinise nearby galaxy clusters in the hope that the clusters' gravity would bend and magnify the light of more distant background objects. Promoted Stories. Growing Up in the Universe: Richard Dawkins Presents Captivating Science Lectures for Kids (1991) To Infinity and Beyond: BBC Untangles the Most Exponential Mystery. Have We Found The Universe That Existed Before The Big Bang? Mysteries of Deep Space - History of the Universe Timeline.