Science and technology benefit one another. New scientific theories afford new opportunities to create technology that can harness the laws of nature. Conversely, new technologies allow for better instrumentation and unprecedented efficiency in scientific progress. It’s a continual feedback loop, and some of the greatest challenges in science are solved simply by throwing more resources at them, or in other words, gathering more data. A good example of this is a relatively old problem for astronomers – determining how the spin of a galaxy affects it’s shape. We certainly don’t want for analogies on Earth, spinning pizza, driving on a...
I’ve spent the last couple of days as a zombie due to the time change, but now that I feel like myself, I’ve got some catch-up posts to do. The first one has to do with today’s APOD. Can you spot the phoenix shape? It doesn’t mean anything special, it’s just the way our brains see the patterns of light from this gorgeous aurora in Iceland. Ionization of atmospheric gases from charged solar particles doesn’t sound as glamorous as ‘phoenix aurora,’ but I still appreciate the scientific beauty of it. Human beings are excellent at pattern recognition, and so we...
The observations of our galaxy throughout history have told us that our Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years across. A number confirmed time and time again by scientists with better and better instruments. But recently a team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, USA, published a paper challenged that idea, saying the galaxy is much bigger, up to 150,000 light years in diameter. They used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s (SDSS) data to look at the distribution of stars outward from the centre of the galaxy, in reference the the galactic plane. They discovered that the stellar distributions oscillated...
This Galaxy, NGC 7714, has an odd shape. In fact we call it a ‘Peculiar Galaxy.’ Why doesn’t it have the characteristic spiral arms if it is indeed a spiral? Why doesn’t it look more diffuse and football shaped like an elliptical galaxy? The reason is that like millions of other galaxies in the Universe, it has recently collided with a nearby companion galaxy. Now using the term ‘collided’ is not really accurate. In reality the two galaxies are interacting via gravity. During a ‘collision,’ stars in the interacting galaxies don’t physically hit each other. The galaxies are incredibly large,...
