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How Galaxies Grow Up

A study of 544 star-forming galaxies shows that disk galaxies like our own Milky Way reached their current state as orderly rotating pinwheels much later than previously thought, long after much of the universe's star formation had ceased. Over the past 8 billion years, the galaxies lost chaotic motion and spun faster as they developed into settled disk galaxies.

World’s Most Advanced Mirror for Giant Telescope Completed

Scientists at the UA and in California have completed the most challenging large astronomical mirror ever made. This mirror, and six more like it, will form the heart of the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope, which will explore planets around other stars and the formation of stars, galaxies and black holes in the early universe.

UA Outreach Program Involves High School Students in Science

The UA's Native American Science and Engineering Program provides American Indian high school students research experience while encouraging them to pursue careers in the STEM fields. The students have been studying water quality and will present their work during an upcoming event.

New Study Brings Doubted Exoplanet 'Back From the Dead'

A team of astronomers including UA graduate student Timothy Rodigas has taken a closer look at Fomalhaut, a star that is 25 light years away and has about twice the mass of the sun. The group's data obtained with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reanimate the claim that an elusive object previously observed around Fomalhaut is indeed a massive exoplanet.

Adam Block and the Cosmic Canvas

Adam Block, astrophotographer and astronomy educator with the UA's Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, has been selected to receive the Advanced Imaging Conference Hubble Award to honor his work in "bringing the cosmos to the people." Block explains what goes into making his images, which regularly appear in astronomy books and magazines and on websites around the world.

Comet Discovered at Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter

As a result of a scheduling conflict, an amateur astronomer in Slovakia has discovered a comet while remotely observing with the 32-inch Schulman Telescope at the UA Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter. Measuring about 5 miles across and traveling on an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, the comet is the first discovered with the public outreach telescope.

Classroom on the Mountaintop

UA doctoral candidate Pacifica Sommers’ project has opened doors for elementary and middle school students to become acquainted with the sky islands and the sky itself, paving the way to developing multi-day natural science and astronomy immersion programs at the UA’s Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter.

UA Astronomers Glimpse Galaxies Near Cosmic Dawn
(Photo: NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team)

UA Astronomers Glimpse Galaxies Near Cosmic Dawn

The deepest images to date from Hubble yield the first statistically robust sample of galaxies that tells how abundant they were close to the era when galaxies first formed.

“We found the most distant galaxies yet identified and were able to reliably determine their age,” said Brant Robertson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and one of the main contributors to the research. 

The results show a smooth decline in the number of galaxies with increasing look-back time to about 380 million years after the big bang. The observations support the idea that galaxies assembled continuously over time and also may have provided enough radiation to reheat, or re-ionize, the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang, lending supportive evidence to a critical but still poorly understood milestone in the history of the universe. 

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