When Galaxies Collide: Antennae Galaxy

By on Sep 19, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

When Galaxies Collide: Antennae Galaxy     The Antennae galaxy is located 45 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Corvus. The image above shows a zoomed out shot of the galaxies interacting with each other. The story goes that about 1.2 billion years ago there were two galaxies known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039. The two galaxies that have collided with each other and it get’s its name Antennae from the two streaks of gas and stars resulted from the galactic collision. The nuclei of the two galaxies has merged together to create one giant galaxy. Interestingly astronomers say that it’s not the stars that collide together but the gas and molecular clouds that collide and have ferocious formations of stars. The view above spans over 500,000 light years.  

Gorgeous Image of the Tadpole Galaxy

By on Sep 18, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

The Tadpole Galaxy     The Tadpole galaxy is a disrupted barred galaxy located 400 million light years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Tadpole galaxies tail of stars is one of the most striking features. It stretches across 280,000 light years whereas our Milky Way is about 100,000 to 120,000 light years across. The main body or galaxy itself is about 300,000 light years behind the tail. The Tadpole galaxy will likely lose its tail as it gets older. Now as you can see that the galaxy is disrupted and there is a theory of how that may have happened. The story goes that a smaller galaxy collided with the Tadpole galaxy from left to right in this view. It was then slung around behind the Tadpole galaxy by their gravitational attraction. During this event the interaction drew out the spiral galaxies stars and the intruder itself can be seen 300,000 light years...

What are White Holes?

By on Sep 17, 2013 in Cosmology | 3 comments

What are White Holes?     White holes are one of the most interesting concepts in math. Maybe you’ve heard of them or perhaps this is your first time. Let’s answer the question what are white holes? A white hole is essentially the reverse of a black hole. Where a black hole sucks in matter faster than the speed of light a white hole expels matter and still attracts matter (we’ll talk about that in a second). Before I go any further a white hole is still hypothetical and it may always be hypothetical. The reason a white hole was introduced is because it can be proven in mathematics. Think about the balance of 1 and -1. When you balance equations in mathematics the other side of the equation is the opposite. In a black hole there is an event horizon that if any matter crosses this event horizon line then there is no going back. A white hole also has this event...

Deep Impact Spacecraft Still Not Sending Back Any Signal

By on Sep 16, 2013 in For Your Information | 0 comments

Deep Impact Spacecraft Still Has no Signal or Communication Coming Back     Well seems like there are major problems happening with NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The mission of Deep Impact is to survey comets as well as observe them close up. The spacecraft was launched in 2005 and has traveled 7.58 billion kilometers (4.7 billion miles) in total thus far. Deep Impact mission controllers have been trying to establish a connection with the spacecraft for quite some time now. The last time there was a connection was on August 8th 2013. The mission controllers believe that there was some anomaly that has caused the spacecraft to continually reboot itself. This means there is very little hope that this anomaly will go away. The spirit rover on Mars had a similar issue but in the end a line of code that allowed the rover to boot up without flash memory saved it. Now the two...

The Strangest Creature in Space Called Cometary Globule CG4

By on Sep 15, 2013 in For Your Information | 0 comments

The Strangest Creature in Space Called Cometary Globule CG4     This is one of the strangest looking “creature” objects in space. It almost looks like this is about to gobble up a galaxy. This is known as a cometary globule or CG4. This is a star forming region that could produce several suns like our own. Cometary Globule CG4 is located 1,300 light years away from Earth and its head is about 1.5 light years across. The actual size including the tail is about 8 light years long. The head is illuminated by the stars that are forming. The red that is glowing in the head is super charged hydrogen. The galaxy you see on the right is actually at least 100 million light years away from CG4. The cometary globule in this image has ruptured and reasons for this are still unknown. Even though CG4 looks like a comet it is certainly much different. There isn’t a lot of...