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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.
Still a Forbes StartsWithABang link.
Is this the only place /. can get it's astronomy?
Videos on Slashdot are gone.
its bears remembering that while the zone of avoidance may be removed from concern, other zones are still legitimately relevant to the night sky. among them:
the zone of unease: rather quite uncomfortable. best not even to mention it.
the zone of overbearing parenting: we just think it would be better for you to not spend to much time in it. ok? have we made ourselves clear?
Autozone: not terrible unless youre after something important and in which case youll spend a very long time indeed searching until you either run out of patience or buy new wiper blades.
the zone: actually a mis-calibration. some orion telescopes will erroneously track to this small strip club in hollywood, california. this setting however can observe most partial solar eclipses visible as well from Germany's Neumayer Station, so, not a total loss...
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's just a name. Like the "Death Zone" or the "Zone of No Return". All the zones have names like that in the Galaxy of Terror.
Stop with the Forbes links already, this site is horrible.
Ethan Siegel submitted this article. It goes to Forbes, which is known to serve malware in their advertisements. You have been warned. Slashdot needs to ban Ethan from submitting his spam articles that point to a malware-ridden site.
Videos on Slashdot are gone.
It's a start.
I imagine it on a 1000 point scale.
A score of 1000 is perfection, Slashdot gets 5.5 million viewers per month, it's one of the top rated sites on the net, we lead by example and the rest of the world comes here for intelligent insightful analysis (as we were in 2006).
A score of 0 is rock bottom, Slashdot gets 1800 viewers per month, no one cares about us any more, a handful of stalwart holdouts remain from the glory days (as we are today).
Clearly, some past decisions have hurt the site and undoing those will bring up our score, but no individual change is worth all that much. A complex tapestry of decisions need to be undone before the new system shines through the noise of statistical variance.
You're on the right path, it was the right decision, I wish you the best of luck and all that.
But you've got a loooong way to go, and each decision you make could add or deduct points.
Time will tell.
Source link updated
First, while WISE is an improvement in the whole "zone of avoidance" phenomenon, it's not perfect. It's resolution was rather low, so even though it could peer through the dust, the glare of foreground stars in the Milky Way still hid a significant fraction of the sky.
Second, there's a proposed solution to the "great attractor" already. It's the galaxy super cluster named Laniakea.
The source
NASA Releases New WISE Mission Catalog of Entire Infrared Sky
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...
WISE Home Page
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/n...
Astronomers no longer need to avoid...? Really? I'll just point my telescope there and see all the new galaxies now.
If you don't want three levels of dumbing-down, here is the actual study, PDF:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lp22...
The Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey
Abstract: A blind HI survey of the extragalactic sky behind the southern Milky Way has been conducted with the multibeam receiver on the 64-m Parkes radio telescope. The survey covers the Galactic longitude range 212 degrees to 36 degrees and Galactic latitudes |b| less than 5 degrees to an rms sensitivity of 6 mJy per beam per 27 kmsâ'1 channel, and yields 883 galaxies to a recessional velocity of 12,000 kmsâ'1. The survey covers the sky within the HI Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) area to greater sensitivity, finding lower HI-mass galaxies at all distances, and probing more completely the large-scale structures at and beyond the distance of the Great Attractor. Fifty-one percent of the HI detections have an optical/near-infrared (NIR) counterpart in the literature. A further 27% have new counterparts found in existing, or newly obtained, optical/NIR 1 images. The counterpart rate drops in regions of high foreground stellar crowding and extinction, and for low-HI mass objects. Only 8% of all counterparts have a previous optical redshift measurement. The HI sources are found independently of Galactic extinction, although the detection rate drops in regions of high Galactic continuum. The survey is incomplete below a flux integral of approximately 3.1 Jy kmsâ'1 and mean flux density of approximately 21 mJy, with 75% and 81% of galaxies being above these limits, respectively. Taking into account dependence on both flux and velocity width, and constructing a scaled dependence on the flux integral limit with velocity width (w0.74), completeness limits of 2.8 Jy kmsâ'1 and 17 mJy are determined, with 92% of sources above these limits. A notable new galaxy is HIZOA J1353â'58, a possible companion to the Circinus galaxy. Merging this catalog with the similarly-conducted northern extension (Donley et al. 2005), large-scale structures are delineated, including those within the Puppis and Great Attractor regions, and the Local Void. Several newly-identified structures are revealed here for the first time. Three new galaxy concentrations (NW1, NW2 and NW3) are key in confirming the diagonal crossing of the Great Attractor Wall between the Norma cluster and the CIZA J1324.7-5736 cluster. Further contributors to the general mass overdensity in that area are two new clusters (CW1 and CW2) in the nearer Centaurus Wall, one of which forms part of the striking 180â--¦ (100hâ'1Mpc) long filament that dominates the southern sky at velocities of â¼ 3000 kmsâ'1, and the suggestion of a further Wall at the Great Attractor distance at slightly higher longitudes.
Glad to see it!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
That 1800 isn't per month, it's a global ranking. It's still bad, but it's not as bad.
Yep, my bad.
It wasn't on purpose, I'll try to be more thorough in the future.
Forbes has chosen to speed their journey into irrelevance with their policies. Don't force Slashdot to follow them down that hole by becoming dependent upon their content.
I would make a sincere request that the editors stop accepting any articles from Forbes, period.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
http://www.extremetech.com/int...
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
One of these sweet bits of kit was the angler exploit kit.
http://researchcenter.paloalto...
Just imagine, 90,000 plus websites out there, just waiting for me to disable my adblocker in order to get some of their yummy ransomware.
Anyhow, take this in the spirit it's given, in case the editors didn't know what Forbes stands for these days. Forced malware.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The link takes me to EarthSky.org so either Slashdot editors changed the link or you are full of shit.
Occam's Razor says Slashdot editors don't edit so well you can see what's left
Infrared can't pass through stars or planets either, and those are far more numerous than black holes. But they are also all still small enough they don't matter that much. The real problem was the dust and gas blocking huge areas and that is what recent surveys have been able to improve on.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
It's boobs.
I was thinking a bit south, but I'll reconsider.
Sorry wrong article. That a first. I should get some coffee. Obviously it is too early in the morning for writing comments. Never mind.