

This image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows NGC 4565, one of the nearest and brightest galaxies not included in the famous list by 18th-century comet hunter Charles Messier

This image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows NGC 6744, one of the galaxies most similar to our Milky Way in the local universe




Highlights from the mission's decade of sky scans include:

-- Catching a black hole "red-handed" as it munched on a star.
-- Finding giant rings of new stars around old, dead galaxies.
-- Independently confirming the nature of dark energy.
-- Discovering a missing link in galaxy evolution -- the teenage galaxies transitioning from young to old.


In a first-of-a-kind move for NASA, the agency in May 2012 loaned GALEX to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which used private funds to continue operating the satellite while NASA retained ownership. Since then, investigators from around the world have used GALEX to study everything from stars in our own Milky Way galaxy to hundreds of thousands of galaxies 5 billion light-years away.

In the space telescope's last year, it scanned across large patches of sky, including the bustling, bright center of our Milky Way. The telescope spent time staring at certain areas of the sky, finding exploded stars, called supernovae, and monitoring how objects, such as the centers of active galaxies, change over time. GALEX also scanned the sky for massive, feeding black holes and shock waves from early supernova explosions.





JPL managed the GALEX mission and built the science instrument. The mission's principal investigator, Chris Martin, is at Caltech. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., developed the mission under the Explorers Program it manages. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on the mission. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.


Media Contact

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
Headquarters, Washington