Galaxy

A NASA image released Friday shows a glimpse of a galaxy with an active black hole, the focus of a recent discovery much of which was made in Baltimore. The space agency's image of the day gallery shows an active black hole squelching star formation in  galaxy Arp 220. The picture uses images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and with an artist's impression of jets of gas emanating from the core of the galaxy. Research announced May 1 revealed that astronomers at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute observed just such a black hole.

Room 110 of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy bears a special name on the placard outside: Rocket Room. Inside, tiny screws, metal clamps, screwdrivers, power drills and colored zip ties cover tables and shelves, the remnants of four years of work building a 24-foot-long tube scientists will soon blast into space. A team of doctoral students and scientists is fine-tuning a rocket payload that will carry a telescope 250 miles above the earth's atmosphere.

Room 110 of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy bears a special name on the placard outside: Rocket Room. Inside, tiny screws, metal clamps, screwdrivers, power drills and colored zip ties cover tables and shelves, the remnants of four years of work building a 24-foot-long tube scientists will soon blast into space. A team of doctoral students and scientists is fine-tuning a rocket payload that will carry a telescope 250 miles above the earth's atmosphere.

First, the bad news: The Andromeda galaxy, an agglomeration of 1 trillion stars that is visible to the naked eye, is hurtling through space at 250,000 miles per hour — and it's coming right at us. What's more, NASA astronomers in Baltimore said Thursday, while Andromeda barrels into our Milky Way, a companion galaxy will join in what the space agency is billing as a "titanic collision. " Now, the good news: With Andromeda still 2.5 million light years away, the collision won't take place for another 4 billion years, the astronomers said.

Astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour are keeping a telescopic eye on a galaxy 54 million light-years from Earth that appears five times brighter than it did the last time NASA's Astro observatory looked at it, in 1990.Called NGC 4151, the Seyfert-type galaxy has varied in brightness on a scale of days, said Baltimore's Arthur Davidsen, principal investigator on the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT), one of three telescopes orbiting on Endeavour with the Astro 2 mission.HUT is being aimed at the galaxy's powerful core every two days in an effort to measure the day-to-day variability.

Edwin Hubble, whose 1936 masterwork, "The Realm of the Nebulae," explained that certain fuzzy objects in the night sky were actually galaxies far beyond our own Milky Way, would have been impressed with the research of his present-day followers.This new generation of astronomers is actually looking into the cores of certain rare galaxies to identify and map their many parts -- clouds of gas arranged in circular patterns around a brilliantly luminous center.Indeed, studying a galaxy's innards is a "hot" branch of astrophysics today, as one scientist put it.Results of the latest research in this field have been published in the April 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

WASHINGTON -- The drum-beaters, whistle-tooters, group-singers, and wave-makers in the crowd of 19,510 had a happy, happy time in RFK Stadium last night.D.C. United, Major League Soccer's top-scoring team, took apart the Los Angeles Galaxy, a hot rival that even with its 4-2 loss last night has given up fewer goals than any other league team.United led 2-0 after three minutes -- against a club that over the full season had given up only a bit more than a goal a game. It was the quickest two goals in United history.

Call it the case of the noisy neighbor.Since the nearby galaxy Cygnus A was first discovered in the 1960s, scientists have puzzled over how it churns out tremendous amounts of radio energy, making it the second strongest source of radio waves in the cosmos.Now three astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have stumbled onto evidence that a quasar -- a mysterious object that can emit a trillion times as much energy as the sun -- nestles at Cygnus A's core, broadcasting all that radio babble.

WASHINGTON -- Feeding a black hole the size of our solar system, it turns out, is as simple as tossing it an occasional galaxy.Yesterday, scientists from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore released spectacular photos of a vast galaxy called Centaurus A, snapped as it swallows the scraps of a much smaller galaxy that first blundered into its path 500 million to 1 billion years ago.The Hubble Space Telescope's infrared camera detected what...

Carson, Calif. -- It took David Beckham less than 24 hours to start thinking like a Californian. England's multimillionaire midfielder and international sports star had no sooner been introduced at the Home Depot Center yesterday morning as the biggest fish yet landed by Major League Soccer, than he was speaking of heading home to Beverly Hills for a dip in the pool. "I try to live my life as normally as possible," Beckham said. "I especially try to make my children's life as normal as possible.

A NASA image released Friday shows a glimpse of a galaxy with an active black hole, the focus of a recent discovery much of which was made in Baltimore. The space agency's image of the day gallery shows an active black hole squelching star formation in  galaxy Arp 220. The picture uses images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and with an artist's impression of jets of gas emanating from the core of the galaxy. Research announced May 1 revealed that astronomers at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute observed just such a black hole.

It's rare to witness the entirety of a murder. But that's how some local scientists investigated exactly what happened during a fatal attack in 2010. The victim? A star — a massive red giant — 2.7 million light-years away that had lost its outer layers in previous brushes with its attacker. The perpetrator was a massive black hole that swallowed the star and spewed its guts out into space over the course of a year. A team led by a Johns Hopkins University researcher conducted the probe, and astronomers say its findings could lead to discoveries that shed new light on the central role black holes may play in the growth of galaxies.

Show children how big the universe is at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Children and their families can get a glimpse of plans for the James Webb Space Telescope and its research into galaxy formation and star life cycles. Children will get to see how the telescope will explore using infrared light. The “Sunday Experiment” event is Sunday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Goddard Center's Visitor Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road. Find more information on the center's website .

A Sunday drive in his vintage Ford Galaxie can't help but remind Adrian Smith of the 1966 NBA All-Star Game. Smith, an unlikely star among stars, won the gas-guzzling convertible as the game's most valuable player. Forty-five years later, it's still parked in his garage. "I was going to take it out today," Smith says from his home in Cincinnati, "but we're expecting bad weather. " The former guard, whose All-Star appearance in 1966 was his first and last in 11 pro seasons, still climbs behind the wheel for occasional freeway jaunts, gunning the powerful engine.

With time running out for the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers in Baltimore and around the world are gearing up for the biggest research project ever mounted on the orbiting observatory. Later this year, astronomers from dozens of institutions will begin gathering images of more than 250,000 of the most distant galaxies in the universe. They will seek answers to some of astronomy's biggest questions - queries that go to the origins of the universe itself. There is a sense of urgency to the effort.

SEATTLE - A cold night, two exhausted teams, overtime inconclusive and a national championship on the line. That was the scenario at Qwest Field on Sunday night, where a wind-chilled crowd of 46,011 saw Real Salt Lake win Major League Soccer's 2009 title. When Robbie Russell's penalty kick hit the back of the net to give the Utah side its first MLS title in only its fifth season, Galaxy heads dropped. The players had given everything, only to fall in a shootout, 5-4, after a 1-1 tie. David Beckham and Landon Donovan tried to lift the spirits, shaking their teammates' hands before hugging each other.

PHILADELPHIA -- Astronomers working around the shortcomings of the Hubble Space Telescope reported their latest results yesterday, including the first glimpse deep into the heart of a globular cluster of stars, a close-up of a developing supernova and a precise distance measurement to a nearby galaxy that could help pin down the age of the universe.But they also pointedly told those attending the 177th American Astronomical Society meeting that such success doesn't mean the $1.5 billion orbiting telescope shouldn't be repaired as planned in 1993 to correct for its serious mirror flaw.

Frederick-based Galaxy Information Services LLC will merge with the e-commerce division of Atlanta's Third Millennium Communications Inc., creating a company that can offer online trade shows and build electronic marketplaces for each of the nation's 3,500 trade associations. The merger, announced yesterday, is the newest wrinkle in the rush to create online marketplaces in the "business-to-business" portion of the electronic-commerce arena. Up to now, many of the virtual marketplaces built for various industries are being created by outsiders -- technology firms without long-standing industry ties that were created, essentially, to establish those markets.

LOS ANGELES - -Did David Beckham bring the crowd down on his own head Sunday night by taunting, challenging and perhaps insulting Galaxy fans at the Home Depot Center? That was the contention of several fans Monday in the wake of the Los Angeles Galaxy's 2-2 tie with AC Milan in a sold-out friendly match in Carson, Calif. It was Beckham's first home game back with the Galaxy after his five-month loan to AC Milan, and he was visibly angry at the anti-Beckham banners in the stadium and at the verbal abuse he received from those who question his loyalty to the Major League Soccer team.

Galaxies colliding! Sounds like a job for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Astronomers believe galaxies have been running into each other for billions of years. There's even evidence our own Milky Way galaxy has swallowed a smaller companion, with more to come, both big and small. These titanic "interactions" often trigger pyrotechnic eruptions of star formation, and sometimes they eject streams of stars into the loneliness of intergalactic space. Yet astronomers say creatures living in those galaxies would hardly notice a thing.