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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Prom Night In The Cosmos/My High School Wasn’t Like This

Prom Night In The Cosmos/My High School Wasn’t Like This

by Tom Levenson|  March 31, 20119:35 am| 24 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Science & Technology

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A bit of (not exactly) random beauty — and a lovely story parsecs from politics — for your morning pleasure:

(Link to a big  tiff here.)

The story:  This image is the winner in the second annual contest the Gemini Observatory runs for Australian high school students, in which teams identify objects in the night sky that could yield images of both scientific interest and sheer gorgeousness.  The students have to submit an essay defending their choice of object, and this year’s winners, five young women from the Sydney Girls High School, proposed taking a picture of a system of colliding galaxies* with the following scientific rationale:

“If enough colour data is obtained in the image it may reveal easily accessible information about the different populations of stars, star formation, relative rate of star formation due to the interaction, and the extent of dust and gas present in these galaxies.”

As the Gemini press release went on to report, the team also argued for, in essence, the transformative value of the art that inheres in great works of science:

When viewers consider this image “in contrast to their daily life,” the team explained, “there is a significant possibility of a new awareness or perception of the age and scale of the universe, and their part in it.”

The data for this image were gathered by the Gemini South telescope — an eight meter monolithic mirror telescope of exceptional optical quality — using one of its primary instruments, a multi-object spectrograph in its imaging mode, as the camera.

As for the analysis of what we are actually seeing above, the Gemini press office writes:

The primary galaxy in the image (NGC 6872) exemplifies what happens when galaxies interact and their original structure and form is distorted. When galaxies like these grapple with each other, gravity tugs at their structures, catapulting spiral arms out to enormous distances. In NGC 6872, the arms have been stretched out to span hundreds of thousands of light-years—many times further than the spiral arms of our own Milky Way galaxy. Over hundreds of millions of years, NGC 6872’s arms will fall back toward the central part of the galaxy, and the companion galaxy (IC 4970) will eventually be merged into NGC 6872. The coalescence of galaxies often leads to a burst of new star formation. Already, the blue light of recently created star clusters dot the outer reaches of NGC 6872’s elongated arms. Dark fingers of dust and gas along the arms soak up the visible light. That dust and gas is the raw material out of which future generations of stars could be born.

So who cares if our current politics is a social-engineering test-to-destruction experiment?  In galaxies far, far, away, they’re getting ready to restart the tape and try again.

You may consider this a cosmic open thread.

*For more images of colliding galaxies — surely some of the coolest objects in the sky — check out this collection of Hubble images.

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24Comments

  1. 1.

    Howlin Wolfe

    March 31, 2011 at 9:51 am

    Over hundreds of millions of years, NGC 6872’s arms will fall back toward the central part of the galaxy, and the companion galaxy (IC 4970) will eventually be merged into NGC 6872.

    You mean, after the rapture, this will still be here???
    Or, you mean, the rapture won’t be for hundreds of millions of years???
    Oh, maybe what we’re seeing has already taken place, the light just having reached us now? BUT THAT WOULD MEAN I HAZ TO BLEEVE IN SIGHUNS!!

  2. 2.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    March 31, 2011 at 10:01 am

    jazakallahu khayran for the perspective.

    my favorite of the 99 names of god is He Who Pastures the Stars.
    i hope we can visit those far pastures someday.
    ;)

  3. 3.

    McMullje

    March 31, 2011 at 10:09 am

    Nothing like a little perspective! Thanks as always!

  4. 4.

    Cat Lady

    March 31, 2011 at 10:09 am

    Joseph Campbell suggested that in order for humanity to survive, the image of the crucifixion needs to be replaced with the view of Earth from the Moon. Where looking forward and not backward really should apply. [insert obvious musical accompaniment here]

  5. 5.

    Judas Escargot (aka "your liberal-interventionist pal, who's fun to be with")

    March 31, 2011 at 10:11 am

    Our galaxy is supposed to collide and eventually merge with the Andromeda galaxy in 3-5 billion years– a burst of star formation, right about when our sun will have reached its expiration date.

    “Human” will be long gone by then (genetic drift, etc), but if anything worthwhile descends from us, they’ll have a very large sandbox to play in.

  6. 6.

    cmorenc

    March 31, 2011 at 10:12 am

    I spend quite a bit of time on clear nights looking at galaxies and star clusters through my 12″ telescope. Visually (i.e. viewed directly by the eye with only the intermediation of the scope’s mirrors and eyepieces, not photographically), the color is lacking, and what structure you can see is often much more limited and subtle.

    But nonetheless, I wonder at the truly ancient light (which left the galaxy I’m viewing anywhere from 2.5 million to 60 million years ago, and in a few cases a couple of hundred million years ago), in EVERY case well before recognizable humans were present on earth. The modest streak I see in my eyepiece also captures an astounding paradox: the galaxy’s width I can see (the slash of light) is obviously of finite dimension, from twenty to a hundred fifty thousand light years across (the outer parts are sometimes washed out if I’m viewing from city rather than dark skies)…but if you calculate out what that sort of distance is in miles, it so dwarfs any concretely understandable or accessible human scale that it might as well be an infinite distance. The whole history of human civilization, from the very earliest settlements, was less in time than it takes for light to get from the left hand side of the “faint fuzzy” shape of the galaxy to its right side (i.e. light purely traveling within the galaxy, not from the galaxy to me). I may as well be looking at infinity itself!

  7. 7.

    arguingwithsignposts

    March 31, 2011 at 10:18 am

    Is it too late to blame Obama for this Galactic shutdown? Or defund the NEA because of it?

  8. 8.

    cleek

    March 31, 2011 at 10:24 am

    those galaxies look exactly like the logo of the company who employs me. makes me think the universe is telling me “GET TO WORK, SLACKER!”

    oh yeah? well, fuck you, spaceman.

  9. 9.

    Tom Levenson

    March 31, 2011 at 10:25 am

    @arguingwithsignposts: No.

    SATSQ.

  10. 10.

    gbear

    March 31, 2011 at 10:27 am

    So this morning’s lesson is that if we grapple with our neighbors, we will eventually be able to scratch our feet without bending over?

  11. 11.

    nancydarling

    March 31, 2011 at 10:48 am

    @Tom Levenson: I am reminded of a quote from Robert Nathan’s “Portrait of Jennie”.

    One must sometimes believe what one cannot understand. That is the method of the scientist as well as the mystic. Faced with a universe which must be endless and infinite, he accepts it although he cannot really imagine it.

    I can’t remember the rest of the quote, but it says something about reaching the end and finding we are at the beginning again. Perhaps I’ve typed these words 10,000 times (or more) before?

    I once calculated how many miles the Sombrero galaxy is from earth. At 28 million light years, it was a number with an astounding number of zeroes.

  12. 12.

    bookcat

    March 31, 2011 at 11:03 am

    Thank you so much for this. When I was a small child, whenever life got to be too much I would think of how big the universe was and how small me and my problems were. It always made me feel better.

  13. 13.

    Redshirt

    March 31, 2011 at 11:21 am

    Enhancing perspective should be the human mission. I think every time a person’s perspective is enlarged, they become a better person, both to themselves and their community.

    For instance, I find it humbling and thrilling to know – for a fact – that every trace of iron in our blood was created in some long ago exploded star. It makes me feel mystical, part of the “one-ness”, and yet, it’s entirely scientific.

    This fusing of the mystical feeling we all experience with science is my personal goal.

  14. 14.

    jprfrog

    March 31, 2011 at 11:45 am

    If those who denigrate science would trouble to learn some of it, they would see that reality is strange and wonderful beyond the paltry imagination of the petty-minded theocons whose arrogance places humanity (especially themselves) at the center of a universe whose extent is beyond comprehension. And whose real workings (if they would learn a little about quantum physics) are stranger than the “mysterious ways” of a god that was imagined thousands of years ago by men who never traveled more than a few hundred miles (at most) from their places of birth.

    But that would require work, change, and humility, supposedly Christian virtues which Christianists lack utterly, being consumed with anger, resentment and hatred.

  15. 15.

    cmorenc

    March 31, 2011 at 11:50 am

    @nancydarling:

    I once calculated how many miles the Sombrero galaxy is from earth. At 28 million light years, it was a number with an astounding number of zeroes.

    A light-year is apx. 5.88 x 10^12 (that’s 5.88 trillion) miles, and that’s rounded off to the nearest 10 billion miles. And so, 28 million light-years is 2.8 x 10^7 light-years, or 1.65 x 10^20 miles (rounded to the nearest HUNDRED billion miles). Or, if you want to see that written out:
    1,650,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

    As a rough approximation simply to get some sort of understandable scale of what that distance to M104 (the Sombrero galaxy) means, a space probe sent to Neptune (the most distant true “planet” in our solar system) would typically take at least a year to get there from earth, and the median distance to Neptune from Earth is 2.835 billion miles, or 2.825 x 10^9. To attempt to travel from earth to the Sombrero galaxy at that rate would take 5.6 x 10^10 years, or 56 billion years (longer than the universe has been in existence since the “big bang”, roughly 14 billion years).

    One could quibble whether a faster means of propulsion could be found than typically used for planetary probes (which typically use gravitational slingshotting around the sun, earth, Jupiter, etc and often take much longer than a year via this method). Nevertheless you’d have to come up a practical implementation of something immensely beyond current technology, and you’d at best still be limited to a finite fraction of the speed of light (else relativistic mass grows infinitely large as do the propulsion requirements). So, one or two hundred million years for the journey of 28 million light-years is about the best that hypothetically could ever be achieved making the most generous assumptions about future technology, short of finding a loophole in the relativistic principles of physics.

  16. 16.

    WereBear

    March 31, 2011 at 12:31 pm

    This thread cries out for:

    The Galaxy Song
    http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/astro/music/Galaxy_Song.html

  17. 17.

    nancydarling

    March 31, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    @WereBear: Love Monty Python, but a wonderment also worth considering is that all the atoms could converge to produce someone who could compose this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noAPeUlOjfc&feature=related

  18. 18.

    jake the snake

    March 31, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    “Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away”

    It is beautiful and aweinspiring, if it doesn’t happen to be
    you galaxy that is colliding. On a cosmic time scale, the lifespan of the human race is only a blink, if that.

    I wonder if there is some way to burn that perspective into the brains of the Koch Brothers and their ilk.

  19. 19.

    nancydarling

    March 31, 2011 at 1:26 pm

    @cmorenc: My daughter, the astronomer in the family, has an eight inch telescope. Even with all the ambient light in L.A. we could see the rings of Saturn so clearly, that they didn’t seem real. I attribute her fascination with the stars to a trip home from a Mammoth ski trip when she was very small. She was laying in the back seat looking out the window and said “Where did all the stars come from?” Living in L.A., she had never seen the Milky Way and the sheer number of all the visible stars was amazing to her. She’s been in love with them ever since.

  20. 20.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    March 31, 2011 at 2:15 pm

    @jprfrog: heh. I’m reading Ibn Arabi’s Time and Cosmology. Amazingly, 400 years before the catholics tried to burn Galileo, he postulated Many Worlds Theory and pre-agreed that time travel to the past is not possible, only time travel to the future.
    Which is one thing Dr. Hawking and Dr. Carroll also agree on.

  21. 21.

    Ruckus

    March 31, 2011 at 2:40 pm

    If my high school was anywhere near as much fun as the ones in Australia sound like I might have been interested in trying to make something of myself besides slacker.

  22. 22.

    A Humble Lurker

    March 31, 2011 at 3:01 pm

    It’s actually kind of comforting (to me at least) that we’re basically a tiny microsecond in the universe’s lifespan, and tinier than the tiniest dust mote in its full volume. Makes my screw-ups seem less monumental I guess. But it’s also cool that we kind of exist as parts of something far bigger than ourselves, but we’re also still individuals at the same time.

    Eh~ I don’t know what I’m talking about…

  23. 23.

    Redshirt

    March 31, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    I have gotten many metaphysical chuckles out of the idea that we are cosmic dust, and we are made of this dust, and will return to this dust. And ashes. Religion did get some things right!

    Cool fact: There are some supernovas that are so intense they actually create dust and shoot it out into space. They’re very rare though.

    Most dust is the result of accretion, like everything else.

  24. 24.

    bemused senior

    April 5, 2011 at 10:45 am

    Your high school and mine were not like that, but our neighborhood high schools apparently are:

    http://astroguyz.com/2011/04/05/30-03-11-student-tool-aids-astrophysicists/

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