The missing mass problem is a long-standing issue in astrophysics, being present in galaxies, cluster of galaxies and even at the cosmological scale. Astronomers from Taiwan have used archival data from PN.S and SAURON to study the internal dynamics of seven nearby elliptical galaxies, and report finding a dearth of dark matter. They conclude that the dynamics of these galaxies are well explained by MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

On Friday 11 January 2013 the Royal Astronomical Society (UK) awarded the 2013 RAS Group award to the SAURON team. SAURON is an integral field spectrograph with a 33 x 44 arcseconds field of view at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. Although it can be used for other astrophysical investigations, the particular science focus of the team that set up the SAURON project was understanding the evolution of elliptical galaxies, via detailed observations of samples of nearby examples of these objects.

Astronomers from the Atlas3D team, using the SAURON integral-field spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope, have found that some of the oldest galaxies in the Universe have three times as much stellar mass, and as many more stars, than all current models of galaxy evolution predict. This result means that the models, which assumed for decades that the light we observe from a galaxy can be used to infer its stellar mass, will have to be revised. A report of the research is published in Nature on 26 April 2012.

Since Edwin Hubble introduced his famous tuning fork diagram more than 70 years ago, spiral galaxies and early-type galaxies have been regarded as being two distinct families. A known issue of Hubbl