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Just as expected, today Sony Ericsson announced their new Walkman phone - the Sony Ericsson W705. The high-end slider is the first music-dedicated feature phone by the company to feature Wi-Fi. Unluckily the rumored GPS connectivity seems to have been dropped out but at least the rest of the specs sheet seems pretty decent.

The Sony Ericsson W705 comes with a 2.4″ QVGA display capable of showing up to 256K colors. Some of its more important features include a 3.2 MP fixed-focus snapper, FM radio with RDS, quad-band GSM and dual-band (900/2100 MHz) 3G support.

The man who replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft Corp.’s top technical thinker said Monday that Microsoft will compete with Amazon.com Inc., IBM Corp. and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power “in the cloud,” distributed across massive data centers worldwide.

The system, Windows Azure, will let companies and hobbyists alike build Web-based programs without having to invest in their own server farms.

The Lich King Arthas has begun his assault on the world of Azeroth, and you and your guildmates are the only ones who can stop him! Explore the frozen continent of Northrend, take part in epic siege warfare, learn the enigmatic new Inscription profession, and customize your character in a variety of new ways. You can even create an all-new Death Knight to turn the Lich King’s powers against him!

Within a billion years of a galaxy’s formation, key structures begin to appear. Globular clusters, the central supermassive black hole, and a galactic bulge of metal-poor Population II stars form. The creation of a supermassive black hole appears to play a key role in actively regulating the growth of galaxies by limiting the total amount of additional matter added.During this early epoch, galaxies undergo a major burst of star formation.

Deep sky surveys show that galaxies are often found in relatively close association with other galaxies. Solitary galaxies that have not significantly interacted with another galaxy of comparable mass during the past billion years are relatively scarce. Only about 5% of the galaxies surveyed have been found to be truly isolated; however, these isolated formations may have interacted and even merged with other galaxies in the past, and may still be orbited by smaller, satellite galaxies. Isolated galaxies can produce stars at a higher rate than normal, as their gas is not being stripped by other, nearby galaxies

A portion of the galaxies we can observe are classified as active. That is, a significant portion of the total energy output from the galaxy is emitted by a source other than the stars, dust and interstellar medium.

The standard model for an active galactic nucleus is based upon an accretion disc that forms around a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the core region. The radiation from an active galactic nucleus results from the gravitational energy of matter as it falls toward the black hole from the disc.In about 10% of these objects, a diametrically opposed pair of energetic jets ejects particles from the core at velocities close to the speed of light. The mechanism for producing these jets is still not well-understood.

Stars are created within galaxies from a reserve of cold gas that forms into giant molecular clouds. Some galaxies have been observed to form stars at an exceptional rate, known as a starburst. Should they continue to do so, however, they would consume their reserve of gas in a time frame lower than the lifespan of the galaxy. Hence starburst activity usually lasts for only about ten million years, a relatively brief period in the history of a galaxy. Starburst galaxies were more common during the early history of the universe,and, at present, still contribute an estimated 15% to the total star production rate.

Starburst galaxies are characterized by dusty concentrations of gas and the appearance of newly-formed stars, including massive stars that ionize the surrounding clouds to create H II regions.These massive stars also produce supernova explosions, resulting in expanding remnants that interact powerfully with the surrounding gas. These outbursts trigger a chain reaction of star building that spreads throughout the gaseous region. Only when the available gas is nearly consumed or dispersed does the starburst activity come to an end.

Starbursts are often associated with merging or interacting galaxies. The prototype example of such a starburst-forming interaction is M82, which experienced a close encounter with the larger M81. Irregular galaxies often exhibit spaced knots of starburst activity.

Formation

Current cosmological models of the early Universe are based on the Big Bang theory. About 300,000 years after this event, atoms of hydrogen and helium began to form, in an event called recombination. Nearly all the hydrogen was neutral (non-ionized) and readily absorbed light, and no stars had yet formed. As a result this period has been called the “Dark Ages“. It was from density fluctuations (or anisotropic irregularities) in this primordial matter that larger structures began to appear. As a result, masses of baryonic matter started to condense within cold dark matter halos.These primordial structures would eventually become the galaxies we see today.

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.While some scientists have claimed other objects (such as Abell 1835 IR1916) have higher redshifts (and therefore are seen in an earlier stage of the Universe’s evolution), IOK-1’s age and composition have been more reliably established. The existence of such early protogalaxies suggests that they must have grown in the so-called “Dark Ages”.

The detailed process by which such early galaxy formation occurred is a major open question in astronomy. Theories could be divided into two categories: top-down and bottom-up. In top-down theories (such as the Eggen–Lynden-Bell–Sandage [ELS] model), protogalaxies form in a large-scale simultaneous collapse lasting about one hundred million years.In bottom-up theories (such as the Searle-Zinn [SZ] model), small structures such as globular clusters form first, and then a number of such bodies accrete to form a larger galaxy.Modern theories must be modified to account for the probable presence of large dark matter halos.

Once protogalaxies began to form and contract, the first halo stars (called Population III stars) appeared within them. These were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, and may have been massive. If so, these huge stars would have quickly consumed their supply of fuel and became supernovae, releasing heavy elements into the interstellar medium.This first generation of stars re-ionized the surrounding neutral hydrogen, creating expanding bubbles of space through which light could readily travel.

The Greek philosopher Democritus (450–370 B.C.) proposed that the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way might consist of distant stars.Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), however, believed the Milky Way to be caused by “the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together” and that the “ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which is continuous with the heavenly motions.”The Arabian astronomer, Alhazen (965-1037 A.D.), refuted this by making the first attempt at observing and measuring the Milky Way’s parallax,and he thus “determined that because the Milky Way had no parallax, it was very remote from the earth and did not belong to the atmosphere.”

The Persian astronomer, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973-1048), proposed the Milky Way galaxy to be a collection of countless nebulous stars.Avempace (d. 1138) proposed the Milky Way to be made up of many stars but appears to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction in the Earth’s atmosphere.Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (1292-1350) proposed the Milky Way galaxy to be “a myriad of tiny stars packed together in the sphere of the fixed stars” and that these stars are larger than planets.

Actual proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a huge number of faint stars.In a treatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant, drawing on earlier work by Thomas Wright, speculated (correctly) that the Galaxy might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars held together by gravitational forces, akin to the solar system but on a much larger scale. The resulting disk of stars can be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk. Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate galaxies.