NASA Mission Update: GALEX
In the early 1900s, Edwin Hubble made the startling discovery that our Milky Way galaxy is not alone, but one of many galaxies, or "island universes," swimming in the sea of space.
How are galaxies born and how do they grow? Since its launch in April, 2003, NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has photographed in ultraviolet light hundreds of millions of these "island universes" across nine billion years of time, helping piece together the evolution of these cosmic species.
Zlatan Tsvetanov: "The fact that it's extremely sensitive in the region where young forming stars are the most easy to see, makes it an extremely powerful machine for studying the evolution of galaxies, star formation rates, also discovering some unexpected things on the way."
Scientists have only begun to pore through the data GALEX has collected over the last five years: ultraviolet images of half a billion objects over 27,000 square degrees of sky. That's an area that would need 138,000 full Earth moons to cover.
Zlatan Tsvetanov: "GALEX has already demonstrated that there are things that we did not know, we did not expect, and they come about very obviously when you have the right tools. One of the most stunning examples is the tail of the very well know variable star called MIRA, which was observed for 400 years, but nobody suspected it had a tail of several degrees in the sky; and It's a pretty stunning discovery…"
To learn more about the GALEX mission, see a portrait of a galaxy's life, and have a closer look at some of GALEX's stunning imagery, like this picture of galaxy M106 taken from 22-million-light years away, visit
www.nasa.gov/galex.
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