The shape of the Milky Way galaxy, our solar system's home, may look a bit like a snail, but spiral galaxies haven't always had this structure, scientists say.
In a recent report, a team of researchers said they now know when and how the majestic swirls of spiral galaxies emerged in the universe. Galaxies are categorized into three main types, based on their shapes: spiral, elliptical and irregular. Almost 70% of those closest to the Milky Way are spirals. But in the early universe, spiral galaxies didn't exist.
A husband and wife team of astronomers, Debra Meloy Elmegreen at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Bruce Elmegreen at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., analyzed an image from the Hubble Space Telescope known as the Ultra Deep Field. It was taken over a four-month period in late 2003 and early 2004. The picture shows about 10,000 galaxies of different ages, some nearly as old as the universe itself. Read more...
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