What happens when a smallish galaxy plows right through the center of a bigger one?

This:

Holy Haleakala. That’s Arp 148, and it’s magnificent. That elongated galaxy was probably not quite so stretchy before it hit, but the gravity of the other galaxy drew it out. In turn, its own gravity drew in stars and gas from the bigger galaxy, which then expanded as a ring as the smaller galaxy plunged on. It almost looks like a freeze-frame image of a bullet shattering a drum head.

If you like that, you’ll love this: Hubble has released 59 such images of galaxy collisions today (the US version of the release is here), celebrating Hubble’s 18th anniversary in space. It launched on April 24, 1990.

The galaxy pictures are stunning. The one on the left is Arp 256, two spiral galaxies interacting as they pass each other for the first time. Long tendrils are being drawn from both galaxies, and the blue regions indicate epic bursts of star formation (young, massive stars are blue and extremely luminous). Someday the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will look very much like this… a billion years from now, when they pass each other. I’d write more here, but golly, I have a book coming out in October with lots more details.

This one is even weirder: it’s a red elliptical galaxy and a bluish spiral interacting. The blue galaxy looks to be small to my eye; it’s getting totally disrupted by the elliptical. There’s some indications of dust getting blown every which-way in the elliptical too. This will be a very interesting system in about another 500 million years or so.

I’ll leave you with one more: NGC 6050.

Two magnificent spiral galaxies, each about the same size, slide toward one another and are just now beginning their slow dance. I can almost imagine them spinning like buzz saws into each other, tearing both to shreds (in fact, they look a whole lot like the animation of colliding galaxies used in my short astronomy video on Hulu — and yes, we’ll be posting that on internationally-accessible servers soon). The two spirals will no doubt merge completely into an elliptical… unless they’re moving too quickly. They are both part of the Hercules Cluster of galaxies, 650 million light years away (the press release says 450 million, but the 2MASS catalog says 650). Hercules has over 100 galaxies in it and is therefore pretty massive; all that mass means a lot of gravity, and that in turn means the component galaxies are screaming along at high velocity. It’s possible these two beauties will continue on their way, passing through each other, distorted, beaten, but surviving.

I wonder how that story will end; lover’s embrace or ships passing (literally) in the night? With images like these, astronomers will learn a lot more about how galaxies behave when they collide, and that will point the way to better, more detailed observations. Eventually we’ll know how the story goes, from start to finish.

Our own future is wrapped up in these images, writ large across the sky. As usual in astronomy, and in science as a whole, by looking outwards we learn more about ourselves.

Happy anniversary, Hubble.

BABloggee David Johnson tipped me off that a new mini-series just began filming in Canada. Called Impact, it will tell the incredibly realistic story of how a chunk of white dwarf will hit the Moon and set it hurtling toward Earth.

Uh, yeah.

You can’t make this stuff up. Wait! I mean, you have to make this stuff up:

Budgeted at $13 million, the effects-heavy “Impact” chronicles the aftermath of a meteor shower during which a piece of a dwarf star lodges itself in the moon. That triggers a series of anomalies on Earth, including cell phone service interruption, exaggerated tides and the occurrence of sporadic weightlessness.

Astrophysicist Alex Kinter (Elliott), with a help of a female astronomer, discover that the moon has been dislodged from its orbit and is on a collision course with Earth.

From the description, it’ll make Armageddon look like Shakespeare. I can’t wait to see it. I’ll tell Mrs. BA to remove all sharp object from the house first though, just to be safe.

If only I had included this scenario in my book! Golly, too late to add it. Shucks.

Update (April 24): Universe Today has more info on what happened; there were problems in the Soyuz performance, but in a weird way it performed correctly; it has a very stable design that allows some failures without killing the crew. But as UT points out, the way this was handled by the Russian space agency is "worrying".

So I’m gone for a few days, and when I get back see tons of news I missed. But the most disturbing was that the Soyuz capsule bringing home astronauts from the ISS had malfunctions that nearly killed the astronauts on board… and that it appears that the Russians have made a conscious campaign to cover up or shift blame for any problems.

This needs to be confirmed, of course, but there’s an awful lot of badness lurking in this story. I’m sure we’ll hear more from NASA and almost certainly Congress. The Russians have been good space partners at some times and very bad ones at others (though in their defense, a lot of issues were due to their collapsed economy). But when their spacecraft nearly kills an American citizen, I would hope Congress would investigate.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama have made statements recently saying that vaccines should be investigated as a possible cause of autism.

Problem is, that claim has been investigated, very thoroughly, and it’s a crock. There is no link whatsoever between the two. If you’ve been following this antivax antiscience nonsense at all, then you won’t be surprised to hear that Tara and Orac have something to say about this. And I agree with both of them that while what Obama and Clinton said aren’t nearly as bad as the garbage spouted by McCain, it’s a bad sign and a downward trend in a campaign that seems to have no end to downwardness.

And so my adventure in Big Science ends.

We returned from the LHC, driving back across the ring, this time on the surface of the Earth and not 100 meters below it. We got back to the hotel, and I found myself dropped back in to the mundane world where protons were just constituents of what I saw around me, and travel speeds were measured in kilometers per hour, not large fractions of the speed of light.

I prepared for dinner, washing up and basically relaxing for a few minutes. It was hard to believe — maybe the best word under the circumstances — that I was done. Still, I was in Europe, in Switzerland, and there was still fun to be had and friends to enjoy.

We went to Geneva for dinner, parking a kilometer from the restaurant so we could walk through the magnificent city. Did you know that in Lake Geneva there is a fountain, the tallest in the world, jetting water straight into the sky 140 meters high? It was magnificent. Chris’s son thought it was a volcano at first, and I could hardly blame him.

We walked through old Geneva to the restaurant, and there we sat for several hours drinking, eating, and enjoying ourselves immensely. Chris told us about a new film project he’s working on, and we laughed ourselves hoarse thinking up outrageous scenarios and ridiculous titles. We chatted about protons, and muons, and relativity. Gia and I shared stories about our respective pasts, and our potential futures.

It was wonderful.

But the next day, Monday, I got to play tourist. Brian had to go to his house in Manchester to prepare for some talks he had to give, and from there he had to go back to CERN. We said goodbye, and he left me in Gia’s care. She took me to London, and we walked for kilometers, sightseeing. She took me to Forbidden Planet, a wonderful science fiction bookstore. There’s one in NYC I’d been to once or twice, but this was the original (well, the original original store moved once they got too big for their storefront). They had a ton of Doctor Who swag, and I picked up a plastic articulated Dalek for The Little Astronomer (and an extra one for reasons I’ll figure out later). There was a paper model TARDIS on display, but sadly there were out of the kits. I’ll have to find one online.

We had Thai food, and a capaccino, and walked through Soho: the music section, the shop section, the, um, physical pleasure section. We came out one street to see a mob scene: the road was blocked off by the police, and there were literally hundreds of people lining the sidewalks. Gia, herself in the TV industry, realized it was the British Annual Television and Film Awards show! We stayed for a while, watching people watching the stars as they were delivered by van, limo, and taxi. I got a kick out of it, not recognizing a single person who received the accolades of the crowd and had their name shouted by the paparazzi. I had hoped to see David Tennant, or at least someone from Doctor Who or Torchwood, but was sadly disappointed. Still, it was fun.

That night had one more event to unfold, though: Skeptics in the Pub, a monthly gathering of London skeptics. We arrived to a packed pub, where there must have been well over 100 people jammed into the bar. After a quick meal (a wonderful ham and cheese panini; don’t believe anyone who says British food is awful) I was on! I gave my Moon Hoax talk to the crowd, and was overwhelmed with the reception. The audience was raucus, warm, friendly (very friendly; hi Mark and Kelly!) and the Q&A session went on for quite some time. I got lots of laughs using British slang, and all in all it was the psychic equivalent of being carried around on peoples’ shoulders. And I have to say, it’s quite odd to come to a tavern in England thousands of kilometers from home and see so many friends, old and new. Tracy King from Skepchick was there, and Richard Wiseman, and Sid Rodrigues, and many people who had been at the meetup the week before. I also met several e-friends, like Maurizio, and Tom Siefert. Also attending, of all people, was Marcus Allen, the editor of Nexus magazine, who is, well, let’s just say he’s perhaps not a supporter of the idea that the Moon Landings were real. But we chatted amiably, which goes to show that just because two people are on opposite sides of an issue, even one like this, doesn’t mean they have to be wankers to each other.

I also met Gia’s friend Violet, a blogger and TV host who I really wish I could have spent more time with. She struck me as yet another Brit with a lot to say and the intellect to back it up. I found myself thinking this so many times… in fact, without exception, I liked every single person Gia and Brian introduced me to. They clearly travel in a good crowd, and on Day 3 or so I suddenly realized that they included me among them. What an honor!

I had lots of time to think on this trip — mostly at 3:00 a.m., struck by jet lag — and my thoughts have been good ones. I cannot really convey in words what this trip has meant to me. I’m pleased that Brian thought enough of me to invite to CERN so I could see it and be interviewed for their podcast (which will go live shortly). I’m in deep gratitude to both him and even more so to Gia for hosting me, and taking care of me and supporting me in a country where everyone talks funny and drives on the wrong side of the road. I’m still a bit overwhelmed from the support of the crowd of skeptics at the pub — battling nonsense on a daily basis is more draining than you can imagine, and hearing their applause will keep me energized and in fighting trim for months to come.

And I keep thinking of the LHC, and what it may mean to science. This is no joke, no exaggeration: it has the capacity to revolutionize science, to jump start new fields of physics, give us a literal quantum leap in learning and understanding. If that were the only aspect of my trip I took home, it would be enough. But I’m glad there was so much more. My horizons have been considerably broadened by the past week, and for that I am very grateful.

The Skeptologists has a new teaser trailer! I liked the first one, but this one is even more better.

We’re also working behind the scenes, putting together ideas and getting ready to pitch the show. But we still need your help! If you support this idea (and if you read this blog, then you do) then please let it be known! The more signatures we get, the more likely a studio executive will listen to us.

We need more critical thinking on TV, not another credulous ghost hunting show. Let’s see if we can get this one on, and maybe raise the bar a bit.

This was the big day: the trip to the Large Hadron Collider.

We had quite a crew ready to go from the hotel: Gia, Brian, me, Nick, Nick’s son, Julian, and special surprise guest Chris Morris and his son. Chris is, well… he’s a brilliant satirist (some NSFW language in that link), for one thing. He’s many things, in fact, but he’s quite the science junkie and was loaded with questions about quantum mechanics and relativity, which led for an entertaining day. After breakfast, we all piled into the weird boxy van Brian rented and off to CERN we went.

Our first stop was ATLAS, which dubiously stands for A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS, one of two detectors in the LHC. A pretty good description can be found on the ATLAS wikipedia page, but maybe a bit of background is called for. The LHC is designed to smack protons together head-on at speeds just a whisper under the speed of light. Packets containing millions of protons are guided through evacuated pipes that are cooled down to a mere 2 Kelvins above absolute zero — colder than space itself. There are in fact two beams, each about the width of a pencil, moving in opposite directions around the pipes. At a certain point, the beams are squeezed into even narrower beams, about the width of a human hair, and then the two beams are crossed into each other^*. The packets of protons pass through each other, and when they do at least two but as many as 60 protons collide head-on. When they do, they essentially shatter into smaller subatomic particles. The number, variety, and energies of these fragments are what give scientists insight into the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

They’re hoping to find evidence of the Higgs boson, an as-yet theoretical particle that is thought to give particles like protons their mass. No one understands why particles have mass, but if the Higgs is found, then so is the answer. It’s one of the most basic questions in all of physics… and we may know the solution shortly after LHC is up and running.

ATLAS is one of two detectors designed to see what particles come out of the collisions. Brian works with ATLAS, in fact. ATLAS is very very very very big. I mean very big. I couldn’t fit it all in one picture, even from many meters away! The sheer size of ATLAS is a bit overwhelming, but then, so is everything about the LHC. The accelerator itself is vast: it’s a ring of pipes 27 kilometers around, a circle about 8.5 kilometers across. The energies are fantastic as well. The protons zip around the ring 11000 times per second — for comparison, it took us about a half hour to drive across the ring. Funny… each proton has about the same energy as a mosquito hitting you on the forehead, which doesn’t sound like much, but we’re talking about an object only about 10^-15 times the size of a mosquito. The entire beam energy of the LHC is equivalent to an aircraft carrier moving at 50 kilometers per hour! If something were to go wrong in the beam, it would tear a hole in the pipe containing it. Good thing it’s 100 meters underground.

After visiting ATLAS we went across the ring to CMS, the Compact Muon Spectrometer, the other detector. CMS is also really big, but only half the size of ATLAS. This means we could actually get pictures of it that fit in the frame… more or less The picture on the left is Brian interviewing me for the CERN podcast (directed by Julian; I’ll link to it when it goes live). One half of CMS is in the background. CMS is currently split in half, a bit like a cut orange, awaiting some final preparation before the two halves are slid together.

It’s difficult to convey just how astonishing this all is. The scale of it is simply awesome. Standing off to the side, taking in the size and complexity of CMS and ATLAS, I was filled with a sense of pride. People built this! Every single cable (and there were miles of cable!), every rivet, every bolt, every iron block and metal plate, everything, was dreamed up, designed, redesigned, built, and assembled.

Some people have their issues with science; they think it’s a haphazard, random, and essentially directionless process done by cold-blooded, emotionless scientists. Standing in the LHC puts the lie to that thought. As you drink in the components of this fantastic apparatus, there is an almost overwhelming sense of purpose to all of it, a knowledge that this intricate and amazing machine was built, and its one goal, the only thing it really is designed to do, is further our knowledge of how the Universe works. Humans did this, humans desired to seek out this learning, humans proposed it, humans funded it, humans built it.

And humans will learn from it. That’s what we do.

And as far as "emotionless" goes… well. I dare you: stand there, deep underground, surrounded by the physical manifestation of the desire to learn, looking at 2000 tons of magnet, electronics, and infrastructure, knowing that in a few months, mere meters from where you are standing, subatomic particles too small to see will recreate the conditions that existed just the tiniest fraction of a second after the Universe itself exploded into existence. If you don’t feel an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment, of awe and majesty, then you’d better check your pulse. You must be dead.

No emotionless person could have ever built LHC, could have ever imagined it. It exists because of emotion — joy, wonder, and amazement — the fuel that drives the seeking of scientific knowledge.