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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."
Aha, now all that remains is to find a galaxy shaped like a bottle of maple syrup!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Our local cluster is a franchise of IHOP (intergalactic house of pancakes).
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