The geek stands

One of the deeper mysteries of astronomy is the exact way that galaxies formed and developed. While the overall idea - gas clouds in the early universe coalescing under gravity, with eddies and whirlpools collapsing to form stars - seemed to fit pretty well, there always seemed to be enough exceptions to raise questions about any attempt to get more specific. But now some astronomers at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii think they have discovered something that could resolve at least some of the riddles: a mathematical principle that successfully unites

all galaxies for eight billion years, nearly half the age of the Universe.

All galaxies, they said, follow a consistent relationship between their mass, or weight, and the velocities of the stars and gas clouds that compose them. “We were truly surprised at how well” the pattern fits a dizzying array of galaxy types, said Sandra Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz, co-author of the study. ...

Galaxies fall into three basic types: spiral or disk-like ones such as our own Milky Way; those shaped like roundish clouds, known as elliptical galaxies; and messy, bashed-up or odd­ball galaxies. These are usually thought to be remnants of galaxy collisions, and sometimes dubbed “train wrecks.”

For some time, astronomers have known that spiral galaxies displayed a specific relationship between their masses and the velocity of their stars. Elliptical galaxies also had such a relationship. What Faber and her colleagues claim to have discovered is that there is single, a deeper relationship that describes both types of galaxies - and what's more, that same relationship covers the "train wrecks," too.

Besides unifying the different galaxies under one principle, the discovery has another important aspect:

The findings probably reflect an even deeper property of the cosmos, said Faber.... “Both of these relations were imprinted by the nature of fluctuations [in the uni­verse] that made galaxies in the first place,” she said.

Which means they may well tell us something significant about how the universe evolved.