Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies

[strollingbones]

Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

These hyperactive stars move at about twice the speed of our sun through the Milky Way, because their host galaxy is very massive, yet strangely compact. The scene, which has theorists baffled, is 11 billion light-years away. It is the first time motions of individual stars have been measured in a galaxy so distant.

Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies - Yahoo! News

 

[Old Rocks]

You have to love science. The more we learn, the more questions there are.

 

[waltky]

My first car was a `64 Galaxy convertible w/ 4 speed transmission...

Astronomers: Universe Holds Way More Galaxies Than Thought
October 13, 2016 - It appears that scientists had underestimated the magnitude of the universe.

An international team of astronomers reported Thursday that the universe might be 10, or even 20, times larger than we previously thought, containing as many as 1 trillion or even 2 trillion galaxies. An astrophysics professor at the University of Nottingham in England led the team that came up with the mind-boggling estimate of 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Professor Christopher Conselice said that represents a minimum tenfold increase.

This image from NASA shows a portion of the southern field of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey to recalculate the total number of galaxies in the observable universe. In a report published Oct. 13, 2016, an international team of astronomers have found that the universe contains at least 2 trillion galaxies.​

The scientists based their updated galaxy count on deep-space surveys by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground observatories, which they turned into 3-D images and studied using new mathematical models. “It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied,” Conselice said in a statement. “Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we discover these galaxies with future generations of telescopes?'”

Scientists have puzzled over how many galaxies the cosmos harbors at least since American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed in 1924 that Andromeda, a neighboring galaxy, was not part of our own Milky Way.

Astronomers: Universe Holds Way More Galaxies Than Thought

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Blast from the Past: Comet May Have Hit Earth 56 Million Years Ago
October 13, 2016 - Droplets of glass dug up in New Jersey and from the Atlantic seabed indicate a comet or some other extraterrestrial object may have smacked Earth 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs.

Scientists said on Thursday the collision may have triggered a particularly warm, ice-free period on Earth when important mammalian groups, including the primate lineage that led to humans, appeared for the first time. The findings, published in the journal Science, marked the latest evidence of the profound influence that past impacts by celestial bodies have had on life on Earth. The tiny spherical bits of dark glass, called microtektites, represent strong evidence of a collision with a comet or asteroid, the researchers said. They form when a space rock hits Earth's surface and vaporizes the spot where it lands, ejecting into the air bits of molten rock that solidify into glass.

The microtektites were excavated from a geological layer marking the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago from three sites in southern New Jersey (Millville, Wilson Lake and Medford) and an underwater site east of Florida. That coincided with the beginning of a warming event, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, associated with an accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It lasted more than 100,000 years and drove up global temperatures about 9-14 degrees Fahrenheit (5-8 degrees Celsius).

A tiny sand-grain-size tektite, thought to be created when vaporized material from an impact solidified while flying through the air, is shown in this image released in New York​

The impact of an asteroid about six miles wide (10 km) off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 10 million years earlier killed off many marine and terrestrial creatures including the dinosaurs, and enabled mammals to gain supremacy. No such mass extinction was associated with the event 56 million years ago, although many single-celled ocean-bottom creatures disappeared. During the warming period, primates and two mammal groups — one that includes deer, antelope, sheep and goats and another that includes horses and rhinos — first appear in the fossil record.

The researchers said they have not found the location of an impact crater linked to the collision. They said geological evidence suggested the object was a comet. "We can't really say where it was, or how big, at this point," said geochemist Morgan Schaller of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who led the study. While the findings are not proof that the impact caused the warming period, they are "a rather dramatic finding in support of an impact trigger" for the climate changes, said planetary scientist Dennis Kent of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University.

Blast from the Past: Comet May Have Hit Earth 56 Million Years Ago