Galactic Pancake Mystery Solved

mOoZik writes "According to the BBC, Astronomers have figured out why a series of small galaxies surrounding the Milky Way are distributed around it in the shape of a pancake. Theorists believed that the eleven dwarf galaxy companions should have a diffuse, spherical arrangement, but a University of Durham team used a supercomputer to show how the galaxies could take the pancake form without challenging cosmological theory."

Comments

Re:So therefore...

[Zorilla]

Damn, beaten to the Oolong joke.

For moderators: Oolong the Pancake Rabbit

Re:Way to go, University of Wherever

[Martin Blank]

How much of this kind of research does NASA actually do? It seems that they largely put the satellites in place and maintain them, and universities handle the data analysis.

Re:Way to go, University of Wherever

[kfg]

NASA is about rockets. This isn't the sort of stuff they do really do. They help supply data to astronomers/cosmologists/physicists who apply to them, and who, largely, are affiliated with universities and are not "kids."

Dr. Feynman at CalTech and Dr. Sagan at Cornell, for instance, who were both rather famously at odds with NASA more often than not.

"Citizens" have always handled the bulk of astronomical research.

Because more often than not NASA is the necessary enemy of astronomers. It is a government agency, run for the government's purposes, complete with a government beauracracy, and only provisionally interested in theoretical science at all.

But they own Hubble.

I might also point out that these "kids" weren't even in America. England has a university or two worth a damn that might object to being catagorized as "random", and four or five smart people in them. Germany, China, Australia, and hell (as it were), even the Vatican have quite capable cosmologists of their own.

NASA isn't the center of the universe.

KFG

Re:A Quick Question

[imsabbel]

Angular Momentum

If you have a total angular momentum of 0, you get an eliptical galaxy. All stars have totally random orbital orientations around the center, so it gives an elipsoid. it COULD be a sphere (but what do you mean with gravitational stable? all galaxies are dynamic), but the chances are rather slim).
If there is a angular momentum, it will create a disc simply because thats a lower energy state with the same angular momentum compared to a sphere.