Comments on: Bang!

By: mike

mike — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:37:39 +0000

Everywhere we look in the sky we see galaxies.

The number of places possible for life simply boggles the mind.

At least it boggles my mind.

By: Shoeshine Boy

Shoeshine Boy — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:29:10 +0000

@34 Thespis: Thanks for the info. Now, where is the interrobang key on my keyboard?

By: Thespis

Thespis — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:55:30 +0000

#29 ShoeShine Boy: And people who used a typewriter or know Printer’s Slang (or worked with typesetting in the murky past…)

For even MORE fun, look up interrobang. That’s a *good* Scrabble word.
Or go here for the transcript of the TIME magazine article from 1967.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941558,00.html

By: Galactic Exclamation Point

Galactic Exclamation Point — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:19:49 +0000

[...] Bad Astronomer, who has more info about the collision of these two galaxies. Share and [...]

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:27:39 +0000

A few million years? That sounds suspicious to me. Assuming these galaxies are about 100,000 light years apart (which is roughly the diameter of the milky way’s main disk), moving that far in a few million years would require the galaxies to be falling towards each other at several percent of the speed of light.

Did you mean a few billion years?

By: Enlaces de Astronomía: Semana 08-08-2011 « Campos de Estrellas

Enlaces de Astronomía: Semana 08-08-2011 « Campos de Estrellas — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 19:57:30 +0000

[...] Astronomers to Use Pulsars to Detect Gravitational Waves Created by Super-Massive Black Holes. VV340. Bang!. Diversity of Exploding Stars Provides Cosmic [...]

By: Beige Abc Blog

Beige Abc Blog — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:50:01 +0000

Galaxy Black X 30…

[...] tional disturbance from the merging. It will most likely be the areas already ne [...]…

By: ShoeShine Boy

ShoeShine Boy — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:20:27 +0000

I thought only Linux nerds called the exclamation point “bang”.

Not that I would know anything about that….

By: fastpathguru

fastpathguru — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:45:31 +0000

Clive,

On a fast-enough spaceship, flying towards the pair of galaxies would A) close the time-gap between you and it, fast-forwarding the merger process from your perspective, and B) time-dilation from moving near-light-speed would also have you “aging” more slowly, further fast-forwarding the process…

That would make for one really cool youtube video.

By: Aubri

Aubri — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:27:36 +0000

That’s a really…
*puts on dark glasses*
big bang.
*YEEEEEEAAAAAH!*

By: Clive DuPort

Clive DuPort — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:24:12 +0000

Beautiful picture.

So, 450 million light-years away & will take a few million years to merge. Consequently the coming together occured over 400 million years ago. When’s the next bus so I can go & have a look?

By: Kassul

Kassul — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 10:20:03 +0000

Have observations of these & similar colliding galaxies helped eliminate possible dark matter candidates? The existance of [this many/number/type of] MACHOs for instance would predict that [blah blah etc wooo] would be seen when you had two galaxies merge together, and we don’t observe that, so MACHOs can/can’t be of [whatever type/size/qty]?

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:12:12 +0000

@^ Jack M. I thought “bang” was slang for soemthing else?

Exclaimation mark (resembling) worthy indeed.

Awesome superbly magnificent image here. Thanks.

By: Jack M.

Jack M. — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:56:46 +0000

Clever title of this blog post. I don’t think it’s common knowledge that “bang” is slang for “exclamation point.”

By: James

James — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:00:12 +0000

Yay! New desktop!

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:54:32 +0000

18. zzamboni

Galaxies, like atoms, are 99% empty space(well, ALMOST empty. Just a bit of gas, dust and the occasional solar system). When the Milky Way collides with Andromeda(about 2 or 3 billion years or so), about all we’d see would be an increase in star formation(something which goes on all the time) and some clouds of interstellar gas/dust glowing from hard UV radiation.

,,,anyway, the effects on US would likely be minimal to zero(unless a nearby gas cloud turned into a massive star that then went super nova).
Gary 7

By: Naked Bunny with a Whip

Naked Bunny with a Whip — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:27:24 +0000

@zzamboni: Phil discusses this briefly in his book.

By: Naked Bunny with a Whip

Naked Bunny with a Whip — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:19:49 +0000

And I thought this was a political blog.

If it makes you feel more comfortable, just imagine that one of those galaxies is a collision denialist.

By: zzamboni

zzamboni — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:42:50 +0000

I have a question – what effect would a collision like this have, for example, on us as living beings? Would it affect us at all? I imagine the distances involved are so big anyway that from the point of view of living beings it may not make a difference if our galaxy merged with another one. Is this correct?

By: Chief

Chief — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:05:52 +0000

You have to wonder how many solar masses will wind up in the black holes due to gravitational disturbance from the merging. It will most likely be the areas already near the center of the galaxies that will be affected but hope that no stars with inhabited words are wiped out. With the proximity of the solar matter, I can see where a lot of the cast off planets without a star come from. Our own galaxy has lots of the planet wanderers.

Great picture and wonder if someone could build up a pic of what a similar view would look like with a similar galaxy hanging above the Milky Way.

By: Greg Dorais

Greg Dorais — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:25:27 +0000

RE: 1. CafeenMan:

“Exclamatenate” is a perfectly cromulent word.

By: Sawdust Sam

Sawdust Sam — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:20:05 +0000

A super massive black hole in one galaxy and, presumably, another black hole in the other. Is it inevitable that they will collide? And what will be the result – one extra super massive black hole? And will the collision be impressive?

By: fastpathguru

fastpathguru — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:25:11 +0000

Stuart,

Parallax is ridiculously negligible for pretty much anything extra-solar.

For some perspective, compare the diameter of the Earth’s orbit around the sun (0.00003 light years) to the distance between us and those galaxies (450,000,000 light-years)…

(whoops, Arthur beat me to it.

By: Stuart Brown

Stuart Brown — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:21:45 +0000

@ #12 Arthur Maruyama: Thanks. I suspect I have an exaggerated idea of the extent of parallax due to the fact that when I was child, and in the car with my mother driving, any suggestion to her that the speedometer needle was hovering rather higher than the speed limit was immediately refuted with the declaration that that was just parallax, and one needed to be sat in the driver’s seat to see the correct alignment. I suppose it introduced me to an important scientific concept whilst very young, but maybe mislead me as to the extent to which it applies.

By: Arthur Maruyama

Arthur Maruyama — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:04:04 +0000

@ #8 Stuart Brown

Parallax is useful/a problem only for very close objects in the sky. Even using the Earth’s orbit as the baseline astronomers can only directly calculate via parallax the distance to stars within about 200 light years, so any problems with parallax for objects 450 million light years from Earth can be all but ignored even for space telescope pictures taken many years apart in time.

Hipparcos–an ESA mission launched in 1989–increased the range of parallax-derived distances to about 1600 light years, while Gaia–another ESA mission set to launch in 2013–is hoped to increase that range to tens of thousands of light years (with a 20% error at the extreme range).