I’m not going to pull your pants down and slap your ass, okay? Unless you ask me. So I’m telling you to take everything I’m about to blather about as more than likely science fiction. Okay? Astronomers have found “evidence” of a a hypothesized 9th planet in the hypothesized Oort Cloud.

Sounds about astronomy as usual, right?

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Arp 147 is a straight-up galactic collective. It is composed of two galaxies that collided way back in the past, the results of which have set off a ring of awesome.

New Scientist:

[The galaxies collided in the past which triggered]  a wave of star formation (blue ring in galaxy at right).  A number of these stars exploded as supernovae, producing black holes. Some of these, thought to weigh 10 to 20 times as much as the sun, shine brightly in X-rays (pink blobs) as they rob matter from companion stars.

Arp 147 is currently the dopest one-two galactic punch in the universe. That I know about.

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NGC 2174 ain’t your average nebulae. No sir. Instead it’s the stomping grounds. A battlefield where cosmic forces are throwing down.

NASA:

The energetic light and winds from massive newly formed stars are evaporating and dispersing the dark stellar nurseries in which they formed. The structures of NGC 2174 are actually much thinner than air and only appear as mountains due to relatively small amounts of opaque interstellar dust. A lesser known sight in the nebula-rich constellation Orion, NGC 2174 can be found with binoculars near the head of the celestial hunter.

About 6,400 light-years distant, the entire glowing cosmic cloud covers an area larger than the full Moon and surrounds loose open clusters of young stars. The above image from the HubbleSpace Telescope shows a dense interior region which spans only about three light years while adopting a color map that portrays otherwise red hydrogen emission in green hues and emphasizes sulfur emission in red and oxygen in blue. Within a few million years, the stars will likely win out completely and the entire dust mountain will be dispersed.

C’est La Vie. Or uh, C’est La Existence or something.

Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy posted a gorgeous video today of solar eclipse seen from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft.

In a previous post, Plait explained what NASA’s STEREO spacecraft was:

STEREO –  SolarTErrestrial  RElations  Observatory – they traveled in opposite directions, one ahead and the other behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The goal was to get a wide, stereoscopic view of the Sun which would provide 3D information on our star.

Hit the jump for the video, and go here to read Plait’s more detailed description of STEREO.

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Ah, bulges. Oft, where I want one, I cannot get one. But point a finger at me and you’ll hit my central abdominal bulge. Home of the fourteen pieces of pizza from last night. NGC 3621 doesn’t have my problems. No sir. You see unlike most galaxies, NGC 3621 doesn’t have a central bulge.

Bad Astronomy:

At 22 million light years away, NGC 3621 looks like your usual big spiral galaxy: flat disk, arms sweeping out majestically, central bulge… hey, hold on there a second.  Where’s the central bulge?

Turns out, this galaxy doesn’t really have one. There’s a brightening to the center, sure, but no actual spheroidal region of old stars like in most spirals. That’s weird, and something I hadn’t heard of before! A galaxy that’s all disk.

Spirals can have all manners of central bulges.  Andromeda, for example, has a nice puffy one.  The Milky Way has a compact core but has a rectangular bar going across it. Some have huge bulges, some tiny. But I thought there always  was one. But that’s not the case.

NGC 3621 is the talk of the universe. Other galaxies gawk in jealous rage. I’m just blathering. For more on this, read the full article “A galaxy that’s all hat and no head” by Phil Plait.

You can’t seem to go a week or two these days without some ridiculous news coming out regarding the Kepler telescope. The son of a bitch has been in orbit for something like two years, and the intrepid son of a bitch just keeps finding planets. It’s a planet finding motherfucker. Today it was dropped that Kepler has found in excess of 1,200 possible planets.

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Alasdair Wilkins over at io9 has some existential nausea for you. The universe? Apparently it is at least 250 times larger than it looks. Does that make no sense to you? Yeah, me either. Until! Until some elucidation:

So just how far can we see into the visible  universe? Since the universe is about 14 billion years old, it seems obvious that we can only see within the nearest 14 billion light-years. But that isn’t quite right, as cosmic expansion has expanded the distance between us and the most distant cosmic objects to as much as 45 billion light-years. That means that there’s just about 90 billion light-years worth of visible universe that we can see.

But even that can’t compare with the full size of the universe. Of course, if we can’t see part of the universe, then we can’t actually know anything about it, because no other information will have had time to reach us either. But the trick is that the structure of the universe we are able to see can reveal its overall size. Basically, the universe can have one of three structures: a closed shape like a sphere, a flat shape, or a completely open one. Either of the last two would mean the universe is infinite, but a closed spherical shape would mean the universe has a definite volume.

[cont]

…here’s what they found – in all likelihood, the universe is flat, which means it has an infinite size. But if it  is a closed sphere, then we have a lower limit for its size, which is about 250 times the size of our visible universe. Obviously, 250 times to infinite is a pretty big range, but it’s by far the tightest constraints ever put forward, and having an actual lower limit for the universe’s size could prove hugely useful in other areas of cosmology.

The nausea! The nausea.

Brad Goodspeed has answered the question, “What the fuck would it look like if other planets in our solar system were as close to us as the Moon?” Dude did it in video form, and it’s sexy geek space porn. Goodspeed elaborates on his Vimeo page:

Here’s an animation I did to make you feel small, and also convey the deep awe I feel at the feet of the Universe.
While watching the video of the lunar eclipse I posted the other day I was looking at the curvature of the earth’s shadow on the moon. It made me think about how large the earth might look if an exact copy of it was up there instead of the moon. Soon curiosity got the better of me, and I was animating!

So the basic idea is, each planet you see is the size it would appear in the sky if it shared an orbit with the moon, 380,000 kms from earth. I created this video in After Effects, and because of certain technical considerations had to keep the field of view at 62 degrees. That means the foreground element is not precisely to scale. I realized this after the fact and may update the video at some point in the future. All planets are to correct scale with one another in any case.

It’s gorgeous. Hit the jump to check it out.

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NGC 6503 is a righteous galaxy. A loner, if you will. It sits far outside of the Local Cluster of galaxies, hanging out in a galactic void.

Phil Plait with the deets:

It’s on the edge of the great local void: a vast region of space where galaxies are few and far between. Galaxies tend to exist in clusters and superclusters. The Milky Way is part of the the Local Group, a small collection of a few dozen galaxies which itself sits on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster, 60 million light years away. In the opposite (more or less) direction, toward the constellation of Draco, is the Local Void. Our galaxy is near the edge of this void, but NGC 6503 is actually further into it, 17 million light years away from us. Even then, it’s only on the void’s edge; estimates vary but the empty region extends for something like 30 — 200 million light years in that direction!

So you can picture it: on one side of us is a collection of hundreds of galaxies in the Virgo cluster, which itself is part of a much larger supercluster containing thousands of galaxies. On the other side of us is an empty region of roughly the same size. Somehow, when the Universe itself was young, the matter in this region must have all condensed toward Virgo, leaving the void nearby. We think the entire Universe is this way, with dense regions of matter surrounding bubble-like voids. If you could step back and look, the Universe might appear like a giant sponge!

Outstanding! It’s hard to conceive of giant voids of space that are inconceivably large. NGC 6503 dares to go where uh, only intergalactic eagles dare! But it must watch out as it peers into the abyss. You know what Nietzsche said about the void! Careful if you peer into it, because if you do, you may die alone in an insane asylum or whatever.

I’m paraphrasing.

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NGC 660 must be sippin’ sizzurp or whatever. It’s got some serious leaning going on with its galactic positioning. A sideways galaxy! What the fuck? Elucidation:

NGC 660 lies near the center of this intriguing skyscape, swimming in the boundaries of the constellation Pisces. Over 20 million light-years away, its peculiar appearance marks it as a polar ring galaxy. A rare galaxy type, polar ring galaxies have a substantial population of stars, gas, and dust orbiting in rings nearly perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disk. The bizarre configuration could have been caused by the chance capture of material from a passing galaxy by the disk galaxy, with the captured debris strung out in a rotating ring. The polar ring component can be used to explore the shape of the galaxy’s otherwise unseen dark matter halo by calculating the dark matter’s gravitational influence on the rotation of the ring and disk. Broader than the disk, NGC 660’s ring spans about 40,000 light-years.

Hey man, who am I to tell billions and billions of stars how to present themselves? A galaxy with a little swag? I’m feelin you, NGC 660. Feelin’ you.