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Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

NASA’s Hubble telescope captures tiny Martian moon Phobos – Bangladesh News 24 hours

Posted: July 21, 2017 at 11:56 am


Bangladesh News 24 hours
NASA's Hubble telescope captures tiny Martian moon Phobos
Bangladesh News 24 hours
... Hubble took 13 separate exposures, allowing astronomers to create a time-lapse video showing the diminutive moon's orbital path. The Hubble observations were intended to photograph Mars, and the moon's cameo appearance was a bonus, NASA said ...
Tiny moon Phobos zips by Mars in fun Hubble time-lapseCNET
Phobos photobombs Mars in Hubble viewGeekWire
NASA Hubble Telescope clicks stunning pics of Mars' moon Phobos; watch time-lapse video hereNews Nation
Sci-News.com -EarthSky -NASA
all 34 news articles »

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Don’t Worry About US Space Leadership – Bloomberg

Posted: July 14, 2017 at 11:58 pm

Pretty cool.

In the realm of space exploration, Americans may have not only separated into bubbles but split into entire parallel universes. Last week, in one universe, Vice President Michael Pence vows to regain Americas lost leadership in space. In the other, NASA demonstrates its continued leadership by announcing that the spacecraft Juno is giving the world its first close-up view of Jupiters iconic red spot. Not that U.S. leadership was the main point of this exercise. The scientists are excited to learn about this wonder of the universe --a swirling storm bigger than our entire planet.

In one universe, the Trump administration is going to fix what ails American space exploration. For nearly 25 years, governments commitment seems to have not matched the spirit of the American people, Pence told an audience at the Kennedy Space Center on July 6. In the other universe, Americans and other interested parties from around the world are so thrilled with the Juno mission that they are downloading the raw data from NASA and turning it into images, which range from realistic visualizations to artistic renderings.

Jupiter's red spot is weirdly persistent, considering that earthly storms come and go in a matter of days. As Caltech planetary scientist Andrew Ingersoll describes it, the spot is like a ball bearing rotating between two opposing jet streams. It has been there since the time people were first able to view the face of our solar systems largest planet with telescopes in the late 1600s, he said. For reasons that arent well understood, the spot has suddenly started shrinking. It was three times the size of Earth when the spacecraft Voyager flew by in the 1970s, but now its only 1.4 times the size of our planet.

Juno skimmed by the storms cloud tops at a tenth the distance of Voyager and other previous spacecraft, and its instruments allowed the first view beneath the surface of those clouds. Ingersoll said it should be able to see whether the spot has deep roots - meaning that the storm might extend downwards more than 100 miles. They may also get clues to another mystery -- why the spot is red.

The craft arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, and it has already started giving scientists a view below the cloud tops. They expected all the action to be at the top, with something more uniform and bland beneath, said principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute. Instead, theyve encountered a surprising amount of structure and action beneath the surface -- something different everywhere they peer.

If any other country had launched such a successful mission, politicians would be out of their minds not to mention it in a major speech on space exploration. And this is no isolated success. The team guiding the Cassini spacecraft is giving us a grand finale this summer of an inspiring tour of Saturns rings and moons. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is still showing us views of otherwise invisible gases bursting from supernova explosions or swirling into supermassive black holes. The Kepler satellite has revealed the presence of thousands of planets orbiting other stars, and the Hubble telescope continues to change the way we understand the origin and nature of our universe.

In Pences universe, none if this is apparently worth mentioning. The red spot is pretty, but you cant build a golf course on it. Pences speech suggested that real space exploration requires astronauts. Our nation will return to the moon and put American boots on the face of Mars, he said, painting a strangely militaristic image.

Why I asked a handful of space scientists what they thought of Pences concern about U.S. leadership -- whether wed lost it and whether it would matter if we did. They all said essentially the same thing -- that our leadership is only reinforced by the fact that Europe, China, Japan and India are starting to explore the solar system. While Pence waxed visionary about sending astronauts to places our childrens children can only imagine, Americans have sent people farther into space than any other nation, and now play a leading role in the International Space Station.

Mars has been beckoning for decades, and many administrations before Trumps have made noise about sending people. Scientists havent completely ruled out the possibility that simple life started on Mars and may survive still under the surface. Astronaut-scientists might be able to do the drilling and analysis to finally get an answer. But would it be so bad if the boots of those scientists werent all American?

In terms of sheer distance, we cant compete with our robots. They acquire new superpowers every year, while the American body hasnt changed, except, on average, to get fatter. Besides, people can dream big about robotic missions. I would to see a probe in orbit around Pluto, a submarine exploration of Europas ocean, or sailing the methane seas of Titan, said astronomer Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona.

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Lauer said he understands the desire to walk around on other worlds. In the 1960s, he said, he remembers being 11, staring at a model of the moon, when a teacher asked him if hed like to go there someday. He did want to go to the moon, he said, and back then it seemed a realistic enough goal. None of the really giant dreams from then came true, he said, and I still emotionally miss that alternate future.

But the actual 21st century has not been so bad. Lauer said he was one of the first people to see close-ups of the surface of Pluto by analyzing data from the New Horizons mission and turning it into images. Maybe its good that Trump and his people have shown no interest in these sorts of missions. Otherwise they might start naming things after themselves.

This week, citizen scientists are picking up the raw data from Junos July 10 flyby and creating the first close-ups of the red spot. The first person to see each new part of Junos itinerary doesnt have to be an astronaut. It could be any school kid or science enthusiast from any country. It could be you.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Faye Flam at fflam1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tracy Walsh at twalsh67@bloomberg.net

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‘Fireworks’ Images from Hubble Telescope Capture Stars Forming Just After the Big Bang – Space.com

Posted: July 8, 2017 at 8:54 pm

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this view of the galaxy cluster SDSS J1110+6459, which lies 6 billion light-years from Earth and contains hundreds of galaxies.

A natural magnifying glass has sharpened images captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, revealing a distant galaxy that contradicts existing theories about early star formation. By pairing Hubble with a massive galaxy cluster, scientists captured images 10 times sharper than the space telescope could snap on its own.

The resulting images reveal star-forming knots of newborn stars only 200 to 300 light-years across, in a galaxy that formed only 2.7 billion years after the Big Bang. Previous theories suggested that star-forming regions in the early universe were much larger at least 3,000 light-years across. [Hubble Space Telescope's Latest Cosmic Views]

"There are star-forming knots as far down in size as we can see," Traci Johnson, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. Johnson is the lead author on two of the three research papers describing Hubble's new results, which were published July 6 in the The Astrophysical Journal and the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. The arc consists of three separate images of a galaxy in the background called SGAS J111020.0+645950.8, which has been magnified and distorted through a process known as gravitational lensing.

Though Hubble was built to peer into the early universe, even the legendary space telescope can sometimes use a boost. In this case, astronomers paired the instrument with a gravitational lens, a massive structure in space that bends and distorts light to allow glimpses at greater distances.

Gravitational lenses can be any type of object, ranging from a single massive galaxy to an entire cluster. As light from the more distant galaxy passes the massive object, it is bent and distorted into an arc. For the newfound cluster, this magnified the object almost 30 times. Scientists had to develop a special computer code to remove the distortions and reveal the galaxy as it would normally appear.

Gravitational lenses occur when the light from a more distant galaxy or quasar is warped by the gravity of a nearer object in the line of sight from Earth, as shown in this diagram.

Without the boost of the gravitational lens, the disk galaxy would appear smooth and unremarkable through the Hubble telescope, Johnson said. With it, however, scientists could catch an amazing glimpse of the early universe.

"When we saw the reconstructed image, we said, 'Wow, it looks like fireworks are going off everywhere,'" said Jane Rigby, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the third paper.

The newly spotted galaxy lies about 11 billion light-years from the sun. Because of the connection between distance and time, that means astronomers can see it as it looked 11 billion years ago, only a few billion years after the Big Bang that kick-started the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.

Whereas Hubble revealed newborn stars, NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will reveal older, redder stars. Scheduled to launch in October 2018, Webb will also be able to peer through the dust around the galaxy.

"With the Webb Telescope, we'll be able to tell you what happened in this galaxy in the past, and what we missed with Hubble because of dust," Rigby said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd Facebook or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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New Star Images Captured by Hubble Telescope With Help From Gravity ‘Look Like Fireworks’ – Newsweek

Posted: at 3:55 am

Scientists have looked back in time, further than they usually can with the instruments available to them, at a faraway galaxy composed of bright clumps of newborn stars. The great distance and the time it takes light to travel that far mean the galaxy appearsto these Earth-bound humans as it was 11 billion years ago, or just 2.7 billion years after the Big Bang.

"When we saw the reconstructed image we said, 'Wow, it looks like fireworks are going off everywhere,'" astronomer Jane Rigby of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope, taken advantage of a natural phenomenon and applied new computational methods to capture closer-up and more detailed imagesabout 10 times sharper than they could with the telescope alone. The findings were published in three papers: One in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and two in The Astrophysical Journal.

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The galaxy cluster SDSS J1110+6459 is about 6 billion light-years from Earth and contains hundreds of galaxies. At left, a distinctive blue arc is actually composed of three separate images of a more distant background galaxy called SGAS J111020.0+645950.8. NASA said the background galaxy has been magnified, distorted and multiply imaged by the gravity of the galaxy cluster in a process known as gravitational lensing. NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

Hubble was aimed in the direction of galaxies that would normally appear smooth and unremarkable, according to NASA. But from this angle, the clusters of stars in between Hubble and the galaxy in question have so much mass that they act as a second, natural telescope, magnifying it and making it brighter.

The gravity from all that mass has distorted the image that we see of the background galaxy, like a telescope or a funhouse mirror, Rigby tells Newsweek, explaining that its an effect that Albert Einstein predicted and that has been proven over and over again since. All of the red and orange clusters in the images are the intermediaries that act as a gravitational lens to make the blue-tinged clusters visible. The main target herewhich appears as an arc, like a smile flipped on its sideis magnified by a factor of 28, Rigby says.

However, the double telescope also warps the image. In this case, it stretches out the arc and makes it appear multiple times. A new computational technique developed by Traci Johnson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan and lead author on two of the three papers, helped researchers figure out how the galaxy was warped and undo it. Theyve reconstructed what they believe the image would look like without the distortions.

In this Hubble photograph of a distant galaxy cluster, a spotty blue arc stands out against a background of red galaxies. That arc is actually three separate images of the same background galaxy. The background galaxy has been gravitationally lensed, its light magnified and distorted by the intervening galaxy cluster. On the right: How the galaxy would look to Hubble without distortions. NASA, ESA, and T. Johnson (University of Michigan)

The new images provide a view of the faraway stars as they would appear with a telescope nearly 33 feet in diameter; Hubble is 8 feet in diameter, Rigby says. She adds that it helps offer a sneak preview of what universe would look like if we could build a much larger telescope than Hubble.

This artist's illustration portrays what the gravitationally lensed galaxy SDSS J1110+6459 might look like up close. A sea of young, blue stars is streaked with dark dust lanes and studded with bright pink patches that mark sites of star formation. The patches' signature glow comes from ionized hydrogen, like we see in the Orion Nebula in our own galaxy. NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

The James Webb Space Telescope, which has a 21.3-foot diameter and is scheduled to launch in October 2018, will offer views even farther out and through dust that may be obscuring Hubbles view. With Webb, researchers will be able to observe older stars and galaxies as they appeared in the first billion years after the Big Bang, which will help them continue studying how star formation evolved over time.

Hubble and Webb, Rigby says, see so far out in the universe that they're acting like time machines.

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Torch meets beeswax in Stratman abstracts – Jackson Hole News&Guide

Posted: July 5, 2017 at 8:55 am

Kay Stratman was trained in traditional Asian brush painting, a watercolor method that uses distinctive brush strokes to create delicate yet vibrant color washes.

But, over the years, her technique has morphed into something distinctly her own.

Her latest exhibit, Natural Abstractions, on display at the Art Association Gallery at the Center for the Arts from Friday to July 29, takes inspiration from nature and turns it into abstract, colorful, vibrant paintings.

Broadly speaking her work is made up of colorful landscapes and scenes of wildlife. The exhibit draws its inspiration from nature as well even though the final, abstracted result could be interpreted in an infinite number of ways.

For me, theyre not completely abstract but for others they might be, she said. Its fun for people to see something completely different from what I intended.

Her painting method combines the control and precision of her training with the spontaneity and fluidity of the natural subjects she likes to paint.

The subject matter of her paintings includes hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, exploding nebulae in the night sky or even a walk through the woods among the elms. One of her paintings in the exhibit, Nova, is based on photographs from NASAs Hubble telescope.

Everythings an exaggeration of nature, she said.

Her technique involves layering stained rice paper infused with molten beeswax, also known as the encaustic method, in order to create depth and visual interest in her paintings. At the opening reception Stratman will demonstrate the fusion technique she used to create her art blowtorch and all and will raffle a small piece.

I used the watercolor on the rice paper in a very abstract way, she said. I would stain the paper to make all these colors run together and add interesting textures.

Stratman has worked on this body of work for years and accumulated about 30 pieces. The exhibit will occupy two floors at the Center.

Seen in person, Stratmans work has an added dimension to it.

One thing that photographs dont show you is the surface texture, which has all sorts of ripples and wrinkles in it, she said.

While the aqua blues and greens of nature dominate, one piece from the exhibit uses muted tones of gray, pink and purple.

While the inspiration usually comes first and the execution second, sometimes the process will be reversed shell notice that shes created colored papers that look like something she didnt intend them to, like fall foliage.

I layer four or five pieces of paper on my painting boards and then Ill splash and paint puddles of color on them, she said.

In that process some layers end up saturated with color and others less so. Stratman then peels them apart and decides which ones she feels work best for her artistic vision.

But Stratman hasnt completely abandoned the form she was trained in, and the exhibit includes references to Asian brush painting. If you look at the colorful abstractions long enough, youll notice elements like bamboo amidst the Western landscapes.

Stratman will give an artists talk July 20 at 6 p.m., coinciding with the townwide Gallery Art Walk.

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Abbott couldn’t read the public mood with the help of the Hubble telescope – The Guardian

Posted: July 4, 2017 at 7:58 am

Tony Abbott spent a lot of time reflecting on issues of national importance last week, contemplating very publicly what he should have done differently when he was prime minister. His conclusions bear little resemblance to the broader publics views of his failings a lack of focus on jobs and education, a budget that undermined every single election promise his party made and the knighting of Prince Phillip.

No, if he had his time again he would have invested in more coalmines and nuclear-powered submarines. While the real prime ministers adversaries in his own party like to paint him as out of touch, Tony Abbotts pronouncements are those of a politician who couldnt read the public mood with the assistance of the Hubble space telescope.

Abbotts determination to remain in parliament, in the news and in the public eye cant only be because he wants to be a wrecker. He must believe even if he only whispers it to himself in the dark that he is relatively young, fit and capable of leading his party again. But todays Essential Report results show that not only does a good-sized chunk of the electorate want him out of parliament but his policy agenda is out of sync with the national conversation.

On the question of same-sex marriage, the trend towards growing support continues with 63% in favour and just a quarter against, representing the highest level of support for the issue in over a year. If you break these numbers down according to generations, the argument that marriage equality is inevitable is reinforced; 74% of 18-24-year-olds support same-sex marriage, compared with 48% of over 65-year-olds. The longer Abbott stays in parliament, the greater distance on this issue between him and the electorate. One area where his position matches the broader position of voters is whether this issue should be solved by a national vote or by parliament alone; 59% still favour a national vote.

But as I have said and written many times, the issues of same-sex marriage is rarely discussed in the qualitative work I have conducted on Australian attitudes; it is most often raised as an example of how our politicians seem incapable of dealing with issues that other countries seem capable of dealing with easily.

What does get raised constantly in all kinds of households, in all kinds of communities across the land, is the question of housing affordability. Abbott did very little on this when he was prime minister. His most recent policy ideas in this area have been to cut immigration and let people raid their superannuation. This reflects his lack of understanding that an issue as complex and acute as the availability and cost of housing requires a suite of policies, not just the few that align with his political agenda.

As the Essential Report numbers show, the community understand a range of measures are needed to deal with this escalating problem including tax incentives for downsizers, a ban on interest-only loans for property investors and, yes, reform of negative gearing.

His suggestion about superannuation is in fact the most polarising measure, receiving 44% support and 30% opposition. In my qualitative work on housing affordability, Ive found very strong views against this idea of using super to buy a home. Even among younger people desperate to get into the housing market, the idea of pillaging their super seems a short-term solution, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Let me end on a positive note for our former PM: the group of voters who are most supportive of him remaining in parliament in some capacity are independents, who dont vote Green, Labor or Liberal. Perhaps they think he is raising the issues that matter to them. Or perhaps it is because he is behaving as if he isnt a member of a party at all, except the one he is throwing for himself.

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Fast-spinning dead galaxy changes ideas about galactic formation – Cosmos

Posted: at 7:57 am

A Hubble Space Telescope image of MACS21291 (the red blob outlined in the white rectangle).

Toft et al.

The astronomical understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve is being revisited after the recent discovery of a pancake-shaped disc galaxy that stopped forming stars just a few billion years after the Big Bang.

This dead galaxy so-called for its lack of star formation was discovered by Sune Toft from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark and his colleagues using gravitational lensing and NASAs Hubble telescope. Ancient disc galaxies are normally too far away to examine in detail, but gravitational lensing offered the researchers a magnified view of this one.

When Toft and team examined the galaxy, known as MACS 2129-1, they initially expected to see a chaotic ball of stars that had formed from the merging of different galaxies.

Surprisingly, however, they found evidence in the photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope that the galaxys stars were born in a flattened disc formation.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature, appear to conflict with observations that elliptical galaxies are generally comprised of older stars and spiral galaxies are usually the domain of younger ones.

Toft and his team suggest that the current rotation of MACS 2129-1 indicates that it must have begun life as a flattened disc and only later changed its shape to become more elliptical.

Toft hypothesises that such a metamorphosis could be caused by a series of mergers with other galaxies from a variety of angles, which would eventually randomise the orbits of stars into what can be seen today.

As Toft points out, this research is invaluable because it is forcing astronomers to re-evaluate their theories of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve over time.

Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early dead galaxies could in fact be discs, simply because we havent been able to resolve them, he says.

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Colorful Nebula Forms a Cosmic ‘Spirograph’ in Hubble Telescope … – Space.com

Posted: June 27, 2017 at 6:55 am

Planetary nebula IC 418 looks like a glowing orange and purple jewel in this Hubble image from 2000.

Space is bejeweled with the stunning IC 418, a planetary nebula with purple and orange coloring enveloping a bright white core. The nebula lies close to 2,000 light-years from Earth on the way to the Lepus constellation.

Planetary nebulas like IC 418 are thelast stage of evolution for a star like our sun; it was once ared giant before it ejected its outer layers into space several thousand years ago. Since its eruption, the nebula has expanded to about 0.1 light-year in diameter, representitives from Space Telescope Science Institute in Marylandsaid in a statement.

The hot, white core visible in the image is the stellar remnant of the red giant, and its ultraviolet radiation creates the fluorescence in the nebula around it. The ejecta will continue to spread into the cosmos over the next several thousand years. The star will cool and fade over billions of years as a white dwarf.

This isthe fate of Earth's own sunin some 5 billion years from now.

The camera filters used to isolate light from different chemical elements are represented by the added colors. Red, at the outer edge of the nebula, shows ionized nitrogen emission this is the coolest gas in the nebula. Green shows hydrogen gas emission. Blue, at the center closest to the star, reveals ionized oxygen emissions this is the hottest gas in the nebula. TheHubble Space Telescope revealed the designs and textures within the nebula for the first time, and experts are still searching for their origin.

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The Hubble Telescope just took pictures of a galaxy twice as massive as the Milky Way – Mic

Posted: June 26, 2017 at 4:58 pm

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made an new discovery: it found a giant galaxy located 10 billion light-years from Earth. The disk-shaped galaxy, named MACS2129-1, is categorized as a "dead" galaxy since it no longer creates stars scientists believe star formation stopped for the fast-spinning galaxy a few billion years after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

The new galaxy is compact. For reference, it is three times heavier than the Milk Way but only half the size, according to study leader Sune Toft, an astrophysicist at Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It also rotates a lot faster than the Milky Way.

This artist's concept shows what the young, dead, disk galaxy MACS2129-1, on the right, would look like when compared with the Milky Way galaxy, on the left.

"We were able to establish that the stars in MACS2129-1 rotate in circles around the center of the galaxy at a speed of over 500 km per second, more than twice as fast as stars rotate in the Milky Way, Toft, who published his findings in the June 22 issue of the journal Nature, said in a statement.

What makes this finding so surprising is that it shatters what scientists had previously believed. Until now, it was accepted that there are two types of galaxies: disk-shaped spiral ones and elliptical-shaped ones. The Milky Way is one of the former, which includes active galaxies that are still making new stars, while the latter are dead galaxies.

Galaxy MACS2129-1 is shown in the top box. The middle box is a blown-up view of the gravitationally lensed galaxy. In the bottom box is a reconstructed image of what the galaxy would look like if the galaxy cluster were not present.

With MACS2129-1, things are different since it is a dead, disk-shaped galaxy. This discovery is essential in understanding how galaxies form and evolve.

"This new insight may force us to rethink the whole cosmological context of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve into local elliptical-shaped galaxies," Toft said in a statement to NASA. "Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early 'dead' galaxies could in fact be disks, simply because we haven't been able to resolve them."

As for what's next, Toft and his team hope to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope a large infrared telescope slated to launch into space in October 2018 from French Guiana to learn more.

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NASA’s Hubble space telescope detects disk-shaped galaxy – BGR India

Posted: June 25, 2017 at 1:55 pm

Astronomers have detected a first-of-its kind compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang. Finding such a galaxy early in the history of the universe challenges the current understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve, the researchers said. The finding, published in the journal Nature, was possible with the capability of NASAs Hubble space telescope.

When Hubble photographed the galaxy, astronomers expected to see a chaotic ball of stars formed through galaxies merging together. Instead, they saw evidence that the stars were born in a pancake-shaped disk. This was the first direct observational evidence that at least some of the earliest so-called dead galaxies where star formation stopped somehow evolve from a Milky Way-shaped disk into the giant elliptical galaxies we see today.

This new insight may force us to rethink the whole cosmological context of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve into local elliptical-shaped galaxies, said study leader Sune Toft from University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early dead galaxies could in fact be disks, simply because we havent been able to resolve them, Toft said. ALSO READ:NASAs Kepler space telescope discovers 10 near-Earth size, habitable planet candidates

The remote galaxy was three times as massive as the Milky Way but only half the size. Rotational velocity measurements made with the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope (VLT) showed that the disk galaxy was spinning more than twice as fast as the Milky Way. Using archival data from the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH), Toft and his team were able to determine the stellar mass, star-formation rate, and the ages of the stars. ALSO READ:NASAs Hubble telescope shows close-up image of Jupiter, Great Red Spot

Why this galaxy stopped forming stars was still unknown. It might be the result of an active galactic nucleus, where energy was gushing from a supermassive black hole. This energy inhibits star formation by heating the gas or expelling it from the galaxy. Or it might be the result of the cold gas streaming onto the galaxy being rapidly compressed and heated up, preventing it from cooling down into star-forming clouds in the galaxys centre. But how do these young, massive, compact disks evolve into the elliptical galaxies we see in the present-day universe? ALSO READ:Here are five interesting facts about NASAs Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter

Probably through mergers, Toft said.

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