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[Centaur]

Here's a link to info on new galaxies discovered with the Hubble telescope:

news.yahoo.com/s/space/20050804/sc_space/hubblefindsgalacticcandystore

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Scientists find mature galaxy eight times larger than Milky Way

US astronomers said they had found a vast, mature galaxy using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes.

"This is truly a significant object," says Richard Ellis, of the California Institute of Technology and a member of the discovery team.

"Although we are looking back to when the universe was only six percent of its present age, this galaxy has already built up a mass in stars eight times that of the Milky Way."

He said the fact such a galaxy had already completed its star formation "implies a yet earlier period of intense activity."

"It's like crossing the ocean and meeting a lone seagull, a forerunner of land ahead. There is now every reason to search beyond this object for the cosmic dawn when the first such systems switched on," he said.

Bahram Mobasher of the Space Telescope Science Institute, leader of the science team, said the galaxy initially looked "young and small, like other known galaxies at similar distances".

"Instead, we found evidence that it is remarkably mature and much more massive. This is the surprising discovery," he said.

Though astronomers generally believe most galaxies were built up by mergers of smaller galaxies, the new discovery suggests that at least a few galaxies formed quickly and wholly long ago. For such a large galaxy, this would have been a vastly explosive star birth event.

The findings were due to be published in the December 20, 2005, issue of the Astrophysical Journal.


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I'm sure we are gonna find incredible Monster sized galaxies whirling out there.

[Maddad]

If galaxies acreate, get larger in time by incorporating other galaxies, then this one really could be a monster by now.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Here's what I think...and it's without any supoorting evidence or hypothesis...

I think that galaxies are like small eddies, existing in a larger unknown body. Perhaps we are in a huge mother galaxy, and encompasses all we can see in our feable instrumentation. And that this "Mother" galaxy is one of countless others in something yet to be discovered or understood.

If we look inward now, past our own selves, down past the molecue to the atom and beyond...we see similar formations of a "Heliocentric" system with particles orbiting a central mass. And each atom has a certain "Oort Cloud" of it's own. And the magnification never ends...just keeps on going. I wonder exactly just where "we" are in the whole scheme of things.

Just boggles the mind...

[Maddad]

Since we see clusters of galaxies, you well could be right about them. The smaller scale though might not work since we now think that that solar system model for the atom is a poor repesentation of what's going on. Each of those individual particles becomes a probability cloud, a region of space where they could be, but won't actually be until we look at them. Or something else looks at them. I've used that idea to show one way gravity might arise from their interation. That part is just my idea, and not supported by anyone else that I know of.