Mitch Cronin Posted November 12, 2008 Share Posted November 12, 2008 a pair of galaxies in mid dance. ...from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060630.html Now tell me that's not one of the coolest images imagineable! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moon The Loon Posted November 12, 2008 Share Posted November 12, 2008 Hey Mitch: That's almost romantic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted November 12, 2008 Author Share Posted November 12, 2008 Ain't it though! .... I think it's just flippin' awesome to see that much dynamic motion, on such a grand scale ("Spanning about 500 thousand light-years"), so far away ("Some 60 million light-years away") apparently stopped dead from our view from within our miniscule place in time/space... and appearing so beautiful! ... to help with that scale, remember the distance of one light year is about 5,865,696,000,000 miles (5.8 trillion), or 9,460,800,000,000 (9.4 trillion)kilometers. cool huh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RGT Posted November 12, 2008 Share Posted November 12, 2008 The pic. is really cool but all that math makes my lil brain hurt. Stop it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newgirl Posted November 13, 2008 Share Posted November 13, 2008 To me it looks like an embryo in an ultrasound photo. Maybe I've had too many rums tonite? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted November 13, 2008 Author Share Posted November 13, 2008 To me it looks like an embryo in an ultrasound photo. Maybe I've had too many rums tonite? If the image you see is really that bad, I'd be looking to upgrade your monitor (or your graphics card, or both?)... you're missing a lot! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vanishing point Posted November 13, 2008 Share Posted November 13, 2008 Great pic, Mitch. For other really cool shots, click on the link attached and go to the "tomorrow's picture" link. There's some equally impressive ones there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Canus Chinookus Posted November 14, 2008 Share Posted November 14, 2008 It really is beautiful, and fitting, since it is in the throes of destroying each other... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moon The Loon Posted November 14, 2008 Share Posted November 14, 2008 It really is beautiful, and fitting, since it is in the throes of destroying each other... Our own Milky Way galaxy is sucking the life out of a smaller companion galaxy: Most of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy lie in a very flat, pinwheel-shaped disk. Although this disk is prominent in images of galaxies similar to the Milky Way, there is also a very diffuse spherical "halo" of stars surrounding and enclosing the disks of such galaxies. Recent discoveries have shown that this outer halo of the Milky Way isprobably composed of small companion galaxies ripped to shreds as they orbited the Milky Way. A discovery announced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) revealsa clump of stars unlike any seen before. The findings may shed light onhow the Milky Way's stellar halo formed. This clump of newly discovered stars, called SDSSJ1049+5103 or Willman 1,is so faint that it could only be found as a slight increase in the numberof faint stars in a small region of the sky. We discovered this object in a search for extremely dim companiongalaxies to the Milky Way," explains Beth Willman of New York University'sCenter for Cosmology and Particle Physics. "However, it is 200 times lessluminous than any galaxy previously seen." Another possibility, adds Michael Blanton, an SDSS colleague of Willman'sat New York University, is that Willman 1 is an unusual type of globularcluster, a spherical agglomeration of thousands to millions of old stars." "Its properties are rather unusual for a globular cluster. It is dimmerthan all but three known globular clusters. Moreover, these dim globularclusters are all much more compact than Willman 1", explains Blanton. "Ifit's a globular cluster, it is probably being torn to shreds by thegravitational tides of the Milky Way." from http://www.atlasaerospace.net/eng/newsi-r.htm?id=1719 Put's global warming in a little more insignificant perspective. Where's Greenpeace when you really need them? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted November 14, 2008 Author Share Posted November 14, 2008 ... In the Southern hemisphere.... You can see (so I'm told) both the "Large Magellanic Cloud" and the "Small Magellanic Cloud", which are "Dwarf" Galaxies that (it is supposed) have lost many of their stars to the Milky Way as they've been "colliding" with us for a long time! Since the vast majority of the area within a galaxy is empty space, these "collisions" are not at all like other collisions... they say it'd be rare to find any two bodies hitting each other... they really just pass through one another and gravity tears at the structure of what once was and eventually creates a larger different structure... but since these things happen in the cosmic time scale, where it can take 200,000 years for a galaxy to turn one rotation, we really only get to see one frame of the stop motion video. ...and that frame has it looking like we've ripped those two poor galaxies to shreds! (Who knows?, Maybe our Sun was once a member of another galaxy that the Milky Way swallowed? ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Don Hudson Posted November 15, 2008 Share Posted November 15, 2008 cool huh? Very. A couple of related notions come to mind Mitch, (other than the wonderful sense of being at home when looking at such images because we're all "star stuff")...it is astonishing to see the gravitational force fields resident in two proximate galaxies produce these patterns in terms of gently pulled swirls and graceful curves when they "collide", though in truth they never touch one another but rather move through one another, so tiny and far apart are their constituent pieces. The second notion that comes to mind is, these beautiful patterns we see and which are the result of the massive aggregate forces from within the collection of stars produce the same beautiful patterns we see when stirring cream in our coffee in terms of the laws of angular momentum and centrifugal force. The universe is "here", and "there", several trillions of miles away, all at once and in the microcosm and macrocosm. One can imagine a "cloud" of particles moving "through" another cloud, both possessing, by virtue of their size, a gravitational field both aggregate and individual from individual stars, which tug minutely at one another, altering their collective paths and redistributing individual particles according to the strength and vector of those forces...close, powerful forces present tight redistributions of stars, those further away less tight, all presenting a physical representation of the invisible gravitational forces at work in the graceful arcing collections of particles. There has to be a far, far better way to describe this! The "pale blue dot" was my favourite of the photos you've posted but these two "dancing galaxies" is pretty spectacular. On the Large Magellanic Cloud, I used to see it every trip we did out of HNL to SYD, changing position slightly depending upon time of year. It was always in the east-southeast. One could see it best by glancing away from where it was...one "became aware" of a giant "smear" in the sky, faint bluish-green but when one looked at it directly it dimmed - because of the structure of the retina in terms of the arrangement of rods and cones, rods being around the periphery of the retina and best for night vision. It is a wonderful sensation to see for oneself such phenomenon. Jupiter's four visible moons, the rings of Saturn, the ice-caps of Mars, the Globular Cluster near M36 (if I recall)...all wonderfully magical and,... slightly haunting things to see with one's own eyes. Keep'em coming Mitch....it does "stuff" for the soul. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Cronin Posted November 16, 2008 Author Share Posted November 16, 2008 Hi Don., I'm not offhand familiar with M36, but I'll have a look That's not the Andromeda galaxy is it?... that's in the M30's somewhere isn't it?... it and a Globular Cluster near it... ? I've never seen any of those things Don, but I'm going to. The best I can do for now is look at the moon and some reasonably bright stuff with binoculars. ...but a friend of mine recently commented "I should get my telescope out again some day." ... ... .... yes you should! sez me.... I didn't know he had one! So....we'll see what he does when I start torturing him with tales of woe about lousy binoculars and shaking hands and awesome things to see , if only.... In the mean time... Google Earth can show you some incredible things when you select "switch to sky". ... Seriously, it's absolutely amazing what detailed photographic data is available to us for free! For anyone who has Google Earth and wants to see what I'm talking about.... Fire it up, then select View and then Switch to Sky, (or just hit the little button that looks a little like Saturn)... But I want to explain something about the quality of what you'll see - imagine first that you're standing in the middle of a donut.... when you look to your side... or in front, or anywhere 360 degrees around you, all you see is donut. ...but if you look up, or down, you see other stuff.... That's what it's like there in Google Sky.... around the donut (the plane of the Milky Way) all there are are lots of stars that impede the ability to see beyond them.... So for that reason, there is more interest in detailed surveys of above and below that plane... that's one reason when you look in Google Sky, you'll see way more detail if you look off the plane of the galaxy... Anyway, just type in M36, and it'll take you there! ...or NGC 4676 and it'll take you there.... or try Coma Cluster or Hubble ultra deep field... also, wherever there's been a detailed Hubble shot, that photo is embedded in the view at the correct depth of field and position... I tell ya it's flippin' awesome! I hope I'm not repeating myself.... I'm getting that feeling though... Rich, Ok, 250 million is it? I wondered... I thought I'd heard 250 something and then, thinking I'd probably exaggerated it in my own mind, I figured it must be 200 thousand... They figure they've got the age of the universe fairly well pegged at 13.7 billion years now ... Phrases like "Standard Candle", "SN Type 1a", and "Cepheid Variables" are used to the tune of absolutely incredible looking math equations and formulas scrawled on scrollable blackboards by a raving madman with a German accent.... lol.... (I'm not kidding, I've seen it... have a look through itunes U but I'm getting two of them mixed up... the physics guy and the Cosmologist) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moeman Posted November 16, 2008 Share Posted November 16, 2008 Love this stuff. Reminds me of the love for physics and astronomy that I developed in elementary and high school. Haven't kept up with it, but I could read this thread for days if the conversation maintained this quality. Keep it up boys and girls! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest rattler Posted November 16, 2008 Share Posted November 16, 2008 A friend passed this picture to me, another example of what we can see in our own backyard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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