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Hubble Takes Pictures of Colliding Galaxies
Jerry Smith writes "The Register reports that the Hubble Space Telescope is still going strong, and took snapshots of two colliding galaxies. The sizes average between thousands and hundreds of thousand light years, containing ten million to one trillion stars. The process took hundreds of millions of years, and will take many more hundreds of millions of years."
you mean 6000? Cause thats how long ago God created the universe...
Seriously, instead of funding real science like the hubble and other versatile projects, we're funding crazy "man to mars" missions and finishing the ISS so that we can dump it into the ocean... we could probably stand to have a decent collider project here (on earth) also, to compete with some of the others that are soon to come online / being proposed. Either that or we can all move to mars, or wait for God to come back.
I think this just falls under the "Damn Cool" category.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Um, none? I suppose I could try to think of some technological offshoot of current astrophysical science, but to be safe let's just round down to 0. Is this "practicality" the metric by which you think we ought to measure all scientific findings?
Can anyone explain what knowledge is gained from these pretty pictures?
Ah, now this is easier. Watching a close interaction between galaxies helps understand collisions we see happening further away, and tightens constraints on cosmological and galactic evolution models (the latter is what I worked on). Of course the pretty pictures are shown to the public --- we're far more interested in the high-resolution spectra of these regions. Starburst regions are of intense interest because of the degree to which the nebulae are enriched promptly with elements like sulfer, silicon, and oxygen (from high-mass, short-lived stars). Then when we see these bright regions in more distant galaxies with a certain ratio of elemental abundances we can make a guess as to the age of the region and perhaps the embedding galaxy. The spectra of many regions also gives us dynamic information about the system's interaction, yielding a good estimate of the total mass interacting gravitationally. We can use these more precise measurements to constrain galactic dark matter models and distributions. And I'm sure there are a hundred other areas of specialized research that will be influenced by high-resolution data of galactic collisions.
Anyone who says that they don't understand why people find science beautiful need to be directed to this photo for a clue.
Imagine what the people who live in those galaxies are thinking...
Some are watching the approaching onrush of supergiants, counting down their star system's remaining few thousand years of life.
Some are on a planet trapped in a dust cloud, wondering about the meaning of the dim legends that refer to bright points of light that once showed in the night sky.
Some are frantically transmitting radio signals to the rest of the universe, to announce "Look! I, too, was once alive."
Some are hauling themselves out of the primordial ooze on their planet, newly warmed by a star passing through their previously cold sector.
Some are looking enviously at the Milky Way, wondering what it was like to live in a quiet galaxy.
Some have packed up their whole ecosystem and are headed out into space on giant arcologies, in search of a cooler, quieter place to settle down, away from the 100,000,000-year maelstrom.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE