Faced with the bewildering array of galaxies in the universe, from orderly spirals to chaotic mergers, it is hard to imagine a unifying principle that describes them all with mathematical precision. But that is just what astronomers have now discovered. The relation between a galaxy’s mass and the orbital speed of its stars and gas is remarkably consistent over a wide range of galaxy morphologies and over billions of years of galaxy evolution, according to new results from a major survey of distant galaxies. The findings show that certain fundamental properties of galaxies have actually changed very little over the past 8 billion years (this is about half the age of the universe).

http://news.ucsc.edu/2007/03/1080.html

AEGIS – All-wavelength Extended Groth strip International Survey