Slashdot Mirror
Astronomers No Longer Need To Avoid the "Zone of Avoidance"
An anonymous reader writes: If you want to look out into the Universe, all you need to do is gather the light it gives off. Unless, of course, there's something in the way. For about 20% of the sky, that's exactly the story. In our own Milky Way galaxy, the neutral gas and dust block most of the visible light everywhere we look, preventing us from observing the Universe beyond. However, although the gas and dust might block visible light, longer wavelengths like radio and infrared can pass right through. Recently NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission mapped the entire sky in the infrared, including the entire galactic plane. It not only found many background galaxies, but it gave us a new window into what's possible. Perhaps, with future missions, we'll discover the cause of the "great attractor" phenomenon after all.
No, that can't explain it. The annoyance with StartsWithABang started far before that happened. People gave him a lot of grief when he was simply linking to his own blog.
I'll admit I tend to dislike seeing a member that does NOTHING but post submissions to the site, never even engaging in the discussion that follows. To me, that smacks of "I'm trying to get my visitor count up, but I don't give a shit about what the members have to say." Maybe others don't agree, but I probably wouldn't mind if an author regularly engaged with the community after posting summaries and links to their own articles, so long as they were interesting and relevant to this demographic. If you check out StartsWithABang's history, it was almost 100% submissions. He never appeared interested in discussing the articles he wrote, so it's not hard to understand why he didn't exactly endear himself to the community.
Contrast that to our new overlords, who have shown to be actually willing to talk to people here, and importantly, to listen to what they have to say in return. That's the essence of slashdot. The news and articles are just a way to get the discussions rolling.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I'll upvote that. Glad people are happy with the removal of videos. Big (overdue) things to come soon: https, unicode support