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New Class of Galaxy Discovered
fructose sends along this excerpt from Space Daily:
"A team of astronomers has discovered a group of rare galaxies called the 'Green Peas' with the help of citizen scientists working through an online project called Galaxy Zoo. The finding could lend unique insights into how galaxies form stars in the early universe. ... Of the 1 million galaxies in Galaxy Zoo's image bank, only about 250 are in the new 'Green Pea' type. Galaxy Zoo is claiming this as a success of the 'citizen scientist' effort that they spearheaded. ... The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way. 'They're growing at an incredible rate,' said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and one of Galaxy Zoo's founders. 'These galaxies would have been normal in the early universe, but we just don't see such active galaxies today. Understanding the Green Peas may tell us something about how stars were formed in the early universe and how galaxies evolve.'"
5 billion light years away means that we're seeing them how they were 5 billion years ago. Do they even exist in their current form or did they merge into larger galaxies to take advantage of synergies?
See this is what happens when all the good names are already taken - a serious project aimed at cataloging distant galaxies is forced to call itself "Galaxy Zoo".
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There is a theory that the expansion of a galaxy "tears" spacetime and creates an energy differential. The energy differential then, as special relativity predicts, transmutes to matter thus creating the matter to form stars.
Given that it is the expansion of the galaxy that causes the creation of matter, it makes sense that smaller, more active galaxies would be able to create new stars.
My pre-teen kids LOVE Galaxy Zoo...they feel they're really helping push out the boundaries of knowledge, and I get lots of teachable moments.
"10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive"
10 times smaller?
100 times less massive?
Isn't it 1/10 the size and 1/100 the mass?
In order to be "10 times smaller than $foo" or "100 times less massive than $foo" doesn't there need to be another point of reference?
I know I'm picking nits, but this is slashdot. People should know better. This bugs me like less vs. fewer, there/their/they're, your/you're, and so forth. I understand it is simply a colloquialism arising from poor grammar among the masses, but in the case of a scientific article, poor writing makes it more difficult to take the writer seriously.
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Great, another overpriced expansion pack. I guess sales from the last time they added a class have dropped, so astronomers are making new areas and classes rather than trying to balance the existing content.
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Since there are 250 of them between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, you have roughly 2 per billion light year sphere. If we could expect to see an average of two within a billion light years from us, meaning within a billion years back, perhaps they still exist and we just don't happen to have any nearby?
Given their density within the 5 billion light year sphere, it should be possible to calculate the odds of having 1.5 billion light years to the closest one.
We already have dwarf galaxies, so it's size doesn't matter. I've never heard of a galaxy class based on color. Is it the star creation rate? Does this have a morphology that is prior unknown? The article didn't seem to clear on this.
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I've spent a lot of hours classifying galaxies at GalaxyZoo. The abstract sense of making a tiny contribution to research gets thin real fast. What keeps me coming back is the surprise factor. You'll click away sorting boring balls and streaks and then up pops a perfect barred-spiral, or a swooshy collision or an oddity that doesn't fit any of the categories, and wakes you up. There are millions of galaxies in the deep-field surveys that are the source, most of them never looked at individually, and you never know what the software will toss up next.
The site has an active and supportive forum community, and it was in the forums that the users -- not the astronomy post-docs who run the site -- first commented on the little green balls, suggested they might represent a unique class, and started collecting them as posts on a thread. There are user-run threads going on for other odd types of galaxy some of which might ultimately turn into research topics as well.
Why is it believed that galaxies formed only in the early universe? Personally, I find a picture of the universe that has a definite beginning to be a form of stealth creationism. Everything we know about nature is cyclical, always changing, reproducing, and eternal. It's easy for people to accept that the universe has no "center" but most people still cling to the idea that it has a beginning. I think stars and galaxies are life-forms which have defined stages and which reproduce. Funny that ~99% of the universe is supposed to be invisible, yet-to-me-detected forms of strange matter when we don't even have a basic understanding of the 99% of matter which we CAN see - that is, plasma. Thinking of all galaxies as being old just fits into a paradigm of ignorance which defines modern cosmogony. Nobody knows what gravity is or how it operates. The gravity wave detectors they sent up detected a whole lot of nothing. In space, we're told, there are "frozen" magnetic fields not induced by electric currents. I have a suspicion that the only good thing we've gotten out of astrophysics for the past 50 years is observational data - the theories, at least, are junk.
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"They're growing at an incredible rate,' said Kevin Schawinski, a postdoctoral associate at Yale and one of Galaxy Zoo's founders.
I'm just an ignorant computer geek, so I'd like to know how these galaxies are growing.
Are they simply superdense and spawn new stars as they expand? Or are they drawing material from some outside source?
Here's my totally crackpot theory: Green Pea galaxies are fed from "white holes" (tm) that spew raw material into the nascent galaxy. These "white holes" (tm) are connected via wormholes to black holes. The raw material gets sucked into the black hole, transits the connecting wormhole, and then gets spewed out the "white hole" (tm) into the center of the Green Pea. That's totally hot! No applause please, just hand me my honorary Ph. D. in astrophysics.
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The galaxies, which are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away, are 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy and 100 times less massive. But surprisingly, given their small size, they are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way.
Isn't there some sort of theory about time and it's constant slowing or something? If something appears 5 billion light years away and yet appears to be forming stars 10 times faster than our local system, could that not be somehow relevant to the passage of time either 5 billion years in the past?
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