The most distant astronomical object yet announced as of January 2011 is a galaxy candidate classified UDFj-39546284.

The problem in the policy officer's mind thus begins to take shape as a galaxy of utterly complicated factors -- political, military, economic, financial, legal, legislative, procedural, administrative -- to be sorted out and handled within a political system which moves by consent in relation to an external environment which cannot be under control.

For galaxies ( which are of course themselves much larger than 10 parsecs, and whose overall brightness cannot be directly observed from relatively short distances ) the absolute magnitude is defined by reference to the apparent brightness of a point-like or star-like source of the same total luminosity as the galaxy, as it would appear if observed at the standard 10 parsecs distance.

After arriving at the Tines homeworld and allying with Woodcarver to defeat Steel, Pham initiates the Countermeasure, which extends the " Slow Zone " – the inner region of the galaxy where the highest technologies, such as artificial intelligence and superluminal travel, are impossible – by thousands of light-years to enclose the Blight.

Remaining issues, such as the cuspy halo problem and the dwarf galaxy problem of cold dark matter, are not fatal to the dark matter explanation as solutions to such problems exist which involve only further refinements of the theory.

Simulation of gravitational lens ing by a black hole, which distorts the image of a galaxy in the background (: File: BlackHole Lensing. gif | larger animation )

Furthermore, the large elliptical galaxy and the edge-on spiral galaxy, both of which have active nuclei, are connected by a stream of stars and dust, indicating that they too are interacting.

This galaxy cluster features two cavities 600, 000 light-years in diameter, caused by its central supermassive black hole, which emits jets of matter.

Its spiral arms wind in both directions, which makes it nearly impossible for astronomers to determine the rotation of the galaxy.

The plane of the outer ring is distorted, which suggests that NGC 4650A is the result of a galaxy collision about a billion years ago.

This suggests that the galaxy is surrounded by a dark matter halo, which provides the necessary mass.

: N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible ;

In addition, the term is used in a broader sense to cover a world-view on a wide variety of topics, including chemical evolution as an alternative term for abiogenesis or for nucleosynthesis of chemical elements, galaxy formation and evolution, stellar evolution, spiritual evolution, technological evolution and universal evolution, which seeks to explain every aspect of the world in which we live.

The speculative equation factors in: the rate of star formation in the galaxy ; the fraction of stars with planets and the number per star that are habitable ; the fraction of those planets which develop life, the fraction of intelligent life, and the further fraction of detectable technological intelligent life ; and finally the length of time such civilizations are detectable.

The discovery of a galaxy more than 13 billion years old, which existed only 480 million years after the Big Bang, was reported in January 2011.

* High velocity clouds, clouds of neutral hydrogen are " raining " down on the galaxy, and presumably have been from the beginning ( this would be the necessary source of a gas disk from which the disk stars formed ).

Our own galaxy ( the Milky Way ) has a tiny satellite galaxy ( the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy ) which is currently gradually being ripped up and " eaten " by the Milky Way.

This would put it far outside our Milky Way galaxy, which is about a hundred thousand light years in diameter, and indeed outside the Local Group and even the Virgo Supercluster ; however, at this distance it would still be within the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex.

A common form is the elliptical galaxy, which has an ellipse-shaped light profile.

An example of this is the ring galaxy, which possesses a ring-like structure of stars and interstellar medium surrounding a bare core.

The detailed process by which such early galaxy formation occurred is a major open question in astronomy.

As the distance between galaxy clusters is increasing today, it can be inferred that everything was closer together in the past.

This has prompted suspicion that Omega Centauri was the core of a dwarf galaxy that had been absorbed by the Milky Way.

This was the first galaxy recognised as having a spiral structure, this structure being first observed by Lord Rosse in 1845.

HIP 13044 b is an exoplanet in the constellation, reported in November 2010, that was discovered to have originated outside of the galaxy.

A spiral galaxy, ESO 510-G13, was warped as a result of colliding with another galaxy.

To support his claim that the Great Andromeda Nebula was an external galaxy, Curtis noted the appearance of dark lanes resembling the dust clouds in the Milky Way, as well as the significant Doppler shift.

Evidence for the early appearance of galaxies was found in 2006, when it was discovered that the galaxy IOK-1 has an unusually high redshift of 6. 96, corresponding to just 750 million years after the Big Bang and making it the most distant and primordial galaxy yet seen.

An ultraviolet flare was observed when a star in a distant galaxy was torn apart from the tidal forces of a black hole.

Astronomers do not know if the collision was simply a glancing blow or a prelude to a full-on merger, which would end with the two galaxies incorporated into one larger, probably elliptical galaxy.

The final book takes place ( largely ) with a mission to a far off system to discover the Tyrathca ' Sleeping God ' ( which was previously unknown, but learnt of in the first novel ), which was discovered by the Tyrathca when they were travelling the galaxy, looking for new planets to populate.

While the nature of these objects was controversial until as recently as the early 1980s, there is now a scientific consensus that a quasar is a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy surrounding its central supermassive black hole.

One of " the hundred " sent out by The Founders long ago to explore the galaxy, Odo was found adrift in 2356 in the Denorios Belt by Bajorans.

Security Chief Odo of Deep Space Nine remarked that it was one of the most brutally efficient organizations in the galaxy, being even more ruthless than the Romulan Tal Shiar.

The predominant theory regarding its formation is that the progenitor galaxy was a barred spiral galaxy whose arms had a velocity too great to keep its coherence and therefore detached.

The SNO detector would have been capable of detecting a supernova within our galaxy if one had occurred while the detector was online.

SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy.

In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems, and established that the core of our Milky Way galaxy contains a supermassive black hole of about 4. 3 million solar masses.

For example, spiral galaxies whose appearance is intermediate between two of the above classes are often identified by appending 2 lower-case letters to the main galaxy type ( for example56 Sbc for a galaxy that is intermediate between an Sb and an Sc ).

Five supernovae have been identified in the M100 galaxy.

It has not been identified as a member of a specific stellar moving group and is orbiting through the Milky Way galaxy at a distance from the core that varies from with an orbital eccentricity of 0. 052.

Messier 87 continued to be called an extragalactic nebula for many years thereafter, but by 1956 it had been identified as an E0-type galaxy.

Many of the brighter blazars were first identified, not as powerful distant galaxies, but as irregular variable stars in our own galaxy.

The Hubble Space Telescope has identified several RR Lyrae candidates in globular clusters of the Andromeda galaxy and has measured the distance to the prototype star RR Lyrae.

The peculiarity of this galaxy was first identified in 1847 by John Herschel, and the galaxy was included in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies ( published in 1966 ) as one of the best examples of a " disturbed " galaxy with dust absorption.

NGC 300 and the irregular galaxy NGC 55 have traditionally been identified as members of the Sculptor Group, a nearby group of galaxies in the constellation of the same name.

NGC 55 and the spiral galaxy NGC 300 have traditionally been identified as members of the Sculptor Group, a nearby group of galaxies in the constellation of the same name.

Messier 102 ( also known as M102 ) is a galaxy listed in the Messier Catalogue that has not been identified unambiguously.

Furthermore, the distance between the two images, 6 arcseconds, was too great to have been produced by the gravitational effect of the galaxy G1, a galaxy identified near quasar B.

In the mid-19th century, Lord Rosse identified spiral structures within the galaxy, making this one of the first galaxies in which such structure was identified.

The brightest group members were frequently identified in early galaxy group identification surveys.

An additional dwarf galaxy was identified as a group member in the HIDEEP survey, which was a more intensive radio survey for hydrogen emission within a smaller region of the sky.

Messier 105 was included in the catalog only when Helen S. Hogg found a letter by Méchain describing Messier 105 and when the object described by Méchain was identified as a galaxy previously named NGC 3379.

Classification of its morphology is difficult, as it is sometimes identified as a lenticular galaxy or as an amorphous or irregular galaxy.

* Jean-Pierre Maillard ( Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, France ) have identified a possible second black hole in our galaxy with an estimated mass of 1, 300 suns.