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Spiral Galaxy Spins the Wrong Way
Ant writes: "The New Scientist has an article about a galaxy in the constellation Centaurus is puzzling astronomers by spinning in the wrong direction. NGC 4622 has bright twisting arms containing newborn stars and lies 111 million light years away."
It could be two galaxies that happen to be lined up from our point of view.
Space can be tricky, there is more there than meets the eye.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
CNN has an article with more information.
I think it's time we wrote our local congresspeople to get this remedied.
That galaxy must be in the southern hemisphere of the universe?
Is this like the Simpsons episode where the water spins the wrong way in the toilet?
The flow of time in that part of the universe "backwards" to the flow of time in our part of the universe.
The Sun Newspaper Online has a worth and informative article about this discovery in its Science section.
I'm a bit confused at why anyone this that this is so bizzaire. Sure, most galaxies are trailing spirals, but there are enough leading spirals to make them not freakish. I'd suspect that it is the spin put on the story by the media, but one astronomer is quoted calling leading-arm spirals extremely rare.
My take on this is that the real news is the evidence of disruption/interaction. We've seen that before (M51, the Whirlpool, is a good example), but it's still a damned cool thing to see.
Says the math geek, I think this is as much of a mathematical problem as an astronomical one -- i.e., we really don't have a good grasp of the dynamics of galaxy formation, and we won't until the math is there. Classical Newtonian orbital mechanics doesn't do it, of course, since it's an n-body problem with a very, very large value of n. Some new kind of analytical technique needs to be invented before we can say we know much about why galaxies look and move the way they do.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Maybe that Galaxy is standing still, or spinning very slowly, and we are spinning the wrong way?
Maybe they're looking at it upside down? :)
ever been to australia? their toilets spin the wrong way- that must be on the underside of the universe!
/me goes out and mugs steven hawkings and steals his phd.
is that there is more to a galaxy than what we can see, i.e. dark matter. Have you noticed that the time it takes the outside of the galaxy to orbit the core is the same as the inside? Normal physics, assuming what's lit is what we can see, would say that the outside would have to orbit much, much slower to not overpower the galaxy's gravity. But they don't, meaning some other source of mass must be both moving with the arms to keep them up, and providng the gravity necessary to keep them in. Otherwise, the core would rotate very quickly, and you would get what happens when you swirl chocolate milk mix in with milk, it'd blend. Not only does that not happen, but there are barrel-arm galaxies whose arms stick straight out, and now, galaxies whose arms point the direction they're going.
I think this just shows even more convincing evidence for dark matter. By exemplifying this galaxy, we can show that there has to be something else there preventing the arms from "oozing" behind the rotation of the galaxy.
Chocolate milk: explains all, even mysteries of the universe
Maybe they made a mistake in the measurements, and as they graphed the rotation of the galaxy time was actually going backwards in their simulation. That would yield the results we see now, in a much more humorous (in a slap-yourself-in-the-face kind of) way.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
They just realized that they were looking at the photographs upside down :)
It am Bizarro Galaxy. Everything am different in Bizarro Galaxy. For example, me am happy in job and relationship; am handsome, too.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
So this is where antimatter comes from...
O=='=++
Yeah, so the Big Bang threw out all these Gazillions of galaxies and don't ya'll think it might be a slight bit possible this one did a 180 degree flip? It's more than likely a slow week in the news, so of course, as always, we have to make up some interesting BS that befuddles unintellectual types. Way to go guys, I'm glad to see we passed geometry class. Get a life you dumbass reporters...
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
For about two seconds, I thought:
"Ooooh! Ooooh! Maybe someone engineered that as visible proof of their presence!"
Then I thought:
"But that would only be a slight probability if it was the only one,"
And it wasn't. And then I thought:
"what if several civilizations had the same idea at the same time?"
Could you imagine how pissed you'd be if you went to all that trouble to stand out and two guys down the block did the same thing? :)
Idle thinking, like idling at a stoplight, burns fuel and gets you no-where. But then again, stopping and starting at every stoplight wastes even more fuel and puts more wear on the engine so... I wonder where I was going with that?