Saturday, September 08, 2007

Early Galactic News

Hubble Sees Ancient Galactic Building Blocks. Hubble and Spitzer look back to when the universe was just 1 billion years old (as best we figure, it's 13.7 billion years old now) and " reveal a collection of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever seen".

In other early galactic news: "Astronomers now believe there's a supermassive black hole at the centre of almost every galaxy in the Universe. These black holes can have millions, or even hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun. Unlike stellar mass black holes, the supermassive versions might have formed differently, going from a cloud of gas directly to a black hole - skipping the star stage entirely."

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