Comments on: Hubble Surprise: Heavyweight Baby Galaxies

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:38:21 +0000

Maybe a Quasar factory?
By the way, how long does it take b4 you science guys and gals start portraying our Milky Way as the Bar Galaxy it is??

By: PHWilson

PHWilson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:42:22 +0000

I could hear dozens of galaxys cry out "Mama" at the sight of the picture.

By: john

john — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:56:34 +0000

We have a mystery. I wonder if this fits or readjusts a current model or does it lead to development of new models for this endlessly fascinating universe of ours?.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:34:37 +0000

Now that's a surprise. I assumed that galaxies, without absorbing other galaxies, stayed about the same size. I wonder if angular momentum gained from central black holes sucking up matter has something to do with it.

By: Gerald

Gerald — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:02:09 +0000

"The galaxies … are a fraction of the size of today's adult galaxies but contain approximately the same number of stars."

Is this an accurate statement? Isn't it more accurate to state that these compact galaxies appear to have the same MASS as today's galixies? To my knowledge, we have no way to count the stars in these distant galaxies. So the best we can do is compute their apparent mass, then divide by the mass of the sun to get an estimate of the number of stars. This assumes that the sun represents the "average" mass of stars, which may be a pretty weak assumption for stars in galaxies 10 billion years ago.