Physicists have found that for the last 7 billion years or so — the anticipated halfway point of the lifetime of the cosmos – galactic expansion has been accelerating. Some unknown force is pushing the galaxies, adding energy to them. A force physicist have named “dark energy”.
“Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet,” is how philosopher and science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon described the phenomena known as “redshift” in his science fiction novel, Star Maker, a history of life in the universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, with most other galaxies moving away from us. Light from these galaxies is shifted to longer (further away and redder) wavelengths – in other words, it is red-shifted, a result of the expansion of the universe.
It’s been said that maps codify the miracle of existence. Often referred to as the “cosmic genome” project, the new Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in its history.
“It is a very curious object that we’ve never seen before. It looks strange and familiar at the same time,” said Dr. Tiantian Yuan, from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D) about image of an extremely rare type of galaxy, R5519,—described as a “cosmic ring of fire”—as it existed 11 billion years ago with a massive hole at its center with a diameter two billion times longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun or three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged. “It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way,” added Yuan.
“The outflows emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space similar to tsunamis on Earth, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars reside,” reports Virginia Tech’s Nahum Arav who has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe using the unique capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Surprising new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled “brim” of the Sombrero galaxy’s disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble’s sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero’s vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy’s central portion, typically made of older stars.
