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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Smeared colliding galaxies

Smeared colliding galaxies
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of its continuing program to collect images of unusual galaxies that had previously not been observed at high resolution.

The Arp-Madore catalogue is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies have been distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving the cores of the two galaxies nestled side by side.

It is likely that this collision has been going on for many millions of years, and will not be over for many millions of years to come. In the end the two galaxies will likely merge into one whose final shape cannot be predicted.

Genesis cover

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

8 comments

  • Cotour

    If not yet named, may I suggest the “Oyster Shell” galaxy?

    Or the “Auris” galaxy?

  • Gregory English

    Is there any evidence of celestial bodies colliding when galaxies come together like this? I suppose that would be too small to detect.

  • Gregory English: Yes, any star collisions would usually be too small to detect, but such collisions are expected to be exceedingly rare. Space is big, far bigger than we can imagine. There is plenty of room for the stars of the two galaxies to miss each other entirely. All that happens is that their gravity fields interact, forcing objects to change directions.

  • Col Beausabre

    I cant help but wonder what it would be like to be living on a planet in one of those two galaxies. In addition to disrupting the galaxies, I would think tidal forces would do the same to solar systems

  • Cotour

    Col B:

    In the narrow slice that is the time frame of your life span as compared to the time frame of the galaxies colliding, I do not even think you would notice anything.

  • Actually, probably almost no solar systems would effected at all. Just as space is too big for any stars to collide, gravity as a force is too weak for the changes here to influence individual planets.

  • I believe the same sort of issues happen just orbiting inside a galaxy: By the time a star makes it around “to the same place”, the neighborhood is entirely different from the previous orbit. Getting pulled a little out of line due to extra-galactic stars passing through is not really anything new or interesting from the stars perspective: Just another perturbation.

    Even if “flung” out of the galaxy, it would take so long that the planets would just get dragged along for the ride and not really notice. The changes to the night sky might be interesting – for anyone with records spanning the millennia it would take to notice.

  • Star Bird

    The Andromeda Galaxy and Alpha Cestari the Jupiter 2

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