A galaxy with swirling arms
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was released yesterday by the science team that operates the Hubble Space Telescope. It captures a galaxy about 520 million light years away that appears to have been reshaped due to a galaxy merger.
That merger somehow distorted the disk of the inner galaxy, the brightest area, while also producing two sweeping spiral streams in the surrounding periphery.
Despite its unusual shape, astronomers did not choose to study this galaxy. From the caption:
This observation is a gem from the Galaxy Zoo project, a citizen science project involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world who classified galaxies to help scientists solve a problem of astronomical proportions: how to sort through the vast amounts of data generated by telescopes. A public vote selected the most astronomically intriguing objects for follow-up observations with Hubble. CGCG 396-2 is one such object, imaged here by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was released yesterday by the science team that operates the Hubble Space Telescope. It captures a galaxy about 520 million light years away that appears to have been reshaped due to a galaxy merger.
That merger somehow distorted the disk of the inner galaxy, the brightest area, while also producing two sweeping spiral streams in the surrounding periphery.
Despite its unusual shape, astronomers did not choose to study this galaxy. From the caption:
This observation is a gem from the Galaxy Zoo project, a citizen science project involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world who classified galaxies to help scientists solve a problem of astronomical proportions: how to sort through the vast amounts of data generated by telescopes. A public vote selected the most astronomically intriguing objects for follow-up observations with Hubble. CGCG 396-2 is one such object, imaged here by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Galaxy Zoo Project !!!
http://zoo1.galaxyzoo.org/Project.aspx
Love it. Will keep an eye on it.
This merged galaxy will now have two black holes moving relative to each other and its combined stars? Would astronomers be able to see the path of each black hole in the form of emptiness in the wake? And explosive activity each time the black hole encounters a star?
Stunning. The interplay helps mix things for life perhaps
Is a galaxy just like a solar system in that all the stars are in an elliptical orbit around the center or core of the galaxy? If the two black holes of two merging galaxies themselves merge, would the resulting increased core mass cause the orbiting stars to collapse into the center?
I used to do a lot of Galaxy Zoo and even assigned my astronomy classes to classify at least 500 galaxies each. Some of them actually enjoyed the assignment since they could do it on their smartphone.
@Steve, no the gravity at a distance from the merged black holes is the same. As an example, if we were to compact our Sun down into a black hole, all of the planets in our solar system would effectively continue in their orbits as normal. The overall mass and gravity does not change, only the density.
“… As an example, if we were to compact our Sun down into a black hole, all of the planets in our solar system would effectively continue in their orbits as normal. …”
yes, if the sun was a black hole, the Earth would still orbit as it does now. But if a 2nd sun mass black hole merges with our sun black hole, would that cause all the orbiting planets to collapse into the now 2x sized black hole?
In the case of these two galaxies which have merged, what happens to the black holes of each galaxy? The attraction between the two will be tremendous, no, and they will themselves merge? Which will cause stars which had been orbiting the 1x sized black hole to now collapse into the 2x sized hole.
Steve Richter Asked: “In the case of these two galaxies which have merged, what happens to the black holes of each galaxy? The attraction between the two will be tremendous, no, and they will themselves merge?”
The black holes may not be close enough to each other to collide any time soon. On a galactic scale, they are pretty small. As for the addition of another galaxy’s worth of mass, whenever galaxies collide they come out of it pretty much messed up.