New Class of Galaxy Discovered

fructose sends along this excerpt from Space Daily: "A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the 'Green Peas' with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo. The finding could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. ... Of the 1 million galaxies in Galaxy Zoo's image bank, only about 250 are in the new 'Green Pea' type. Galaxy Zoo is claiming this as a success of the 'citizen scientist' effort that they spearheaded. ... The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way. 'They're growing at an incredible rate,' said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and one of Galaxy Zoo's founders. 'These galaxies would have been normal in the early universe, but we just don't see such active galaxies today. Understanding the Green Peas may tell us something about how stars were formed in the early universe and how galaxies evolve.'"

Registered trademarks

[Shrike82]

See this is what happens when all the good names are already taken - a serious project aimed at cataloging distant galaxies is forced to call itself "Galaxy Zoo".

Galaxy Zoo is a worthy project

[howardcohen]

My pre-teen kids LOVE Galaxy Zoo...they feel they're really helping push out the boundaries of knowledge, and I get lots of teachable moments.

Re:Registered trademarks

[Vectronic]

Indeed, and they also missed out on calling these Galactica, instead of Green Peas

Just random chance we see no recent ones?

[grimJester]

Since there are 250 of them between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, you have roughly 2 per billion light year sphere. If we could expect to see an average of two within a billion light years from us, meaning within a billion years back, perhaps they still exist and we just don't happen to have any nearby?

Given their density within the 5 billion light year sphere, it should be possible to calculate the odds of having 1.5 billion light years to the closest one.

Re:Time to be pendantic!

[Kjella]

10^1 times smaller = 10^-1 times bigger, never really managed to see the problem with it. It's perfectly unambigious since it makes no sense to refer to less than nothing. Things like there/their/they're that actually have three different meanings are much more annoying.

Why a new class?

[east coast]

We already have dwarf galaxies, so it's size doesn't matter. I've never heard of a galaxy class based on color. Is it the star creation rate? Does this have a morphology that is prior unknown? The article didn't seem to clear on this.

no center and no beginning

[czarangelus]

Why is it believed that galaxies formed only in the early universe? Personally, I find a picture of the universe that has a definite beginning to be a form of stealth creationism. Everything we know about nature is cyclical, always changing, reproducing, and eternal. It's easy for people to accept that the universe has no "center" but most people still cling to the idea that it has a beginning. I think stars and galaxies are life-forms which have defined stages and which reproduce. Funny that ~99% of the universe is supposed to be invisible, yet-to-me-detected forms of strange matter when we don't even have a basic understanding of the 99% of matter which we CAN see - that is, plasma. Thinking of all galaxies as being old just fits into a paradigm of ignorance which defines modern cosmogony. Nobody knows what gravity is or how it operates. The gravity wave detectors they sent up detected a whole lot of nothing. In space, we're told, there are "frozen" magnetic fields not induced by electric currents. I have a suspicion that the only good thing we've gotten out of astrophysics for the past 50 years is observational data - the theories, at least, are junk.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

[bloobamator]

"They're growing at an incredible rate,' said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and one of Galaxy Zoo's founders.

I'm just an ignorant computer geek, so I'd like to know how these galaxies are growing.

Are they simply superdense and spawn new stars as they expand? Or are they drawing material from some outside source?

Here's my totally crackpot theory: Green Pea galaxies are fed from "white holes" (tm) that spew raw material into the nascent galaxy. These "white holes" (tm) are connected via wormholes to black holes. The raw material gets sucked into the black hole, transits the connecting wormhole, and then gets spewed out the "white hole" (tm) into the center of the Green Pea. That's totally hot! No applause please, just hand me my honorary Ph. D. in astrophysics.

Time is relative isn't it?

[PaganRitual]

The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way.

Isn't there some sort of theory about time and it's constant slowing or something? If something appears 5 billion light years away and yet appears to be forming stars 10 times faster than our local system, could that not be somehow relevant to the passage of time either 5 billion years in the past?

If you can't read this because, when I press post, the entire universe changes into something completely new, then I'll know that this means that I was right and that I fucking solved it.

If you can read this line, then let it be known that I've had a lot of coffee this morning, and very little food. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.