May 14 1998

From The Space Library

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Current revision

At a NASA press conference, Ethan J. Schreier of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and his colleagues discussed new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images. The new images showed in greater clarity an old galaxy's black hole "feeding on a smaller, younger galaxy that collided with it." The scientists explained that the new images revealed young stars in the midst of an "obviously old galaxy," suggesting that a collision had occurred. The merged galaxy complex, known as Centaurus A, was about 10 million light-years away from the Milky Way. The images, taken with HST's newest infrared camera, also showed gas and dust feeding an apparent large black hole. An inner disc of gas, swirling around the black hole, was behaving in a manner opposite to scientists expectations, based upon the behavior of other galaxies. Hans-Walter Rix of the University of Arizona theorized that the collision could explain the difference, postulating that the HST "may have caught Centaurus A in the midst of trying to realign itself after its spiral companion plowed into it." Schreier offered an alternative explanation-that the mass of the merged galaxies was greater than the mass of the black hole, causing the gravitational pull to warp the inner disc.

The Iridium World Communications system global, digital wireless communications network completed a series of deployment missions, with the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California of five Iridium satellites aboard a Boeing Delta II launch vehicle. The successful launch had completed the entire Iridium constellation "in just twelve months." The world's first global, wireless telephone company scheduled its commercial service to begin four months following this last launch, once it had completed integrating and testing the Iridium system.

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