Smash-Crash!

There are many different kinds of galaxies. The picture on the side is of the Antennae Galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039. Scientifically, you could say that they're 'interacting' but I like to call it crashing. As far as location in the night's sky goes, it can be seen if you point your telescope towards the constellation Corvus.

This is the only galactic collision that we are currently aware of. It's quite obvious as to why they are called the Antennae Galaxies; the clouds of dust and gas swirling about it resemble the antennae of an insect. The end result of the collision is predicted to be a super galaxy. It is speculated that most galaxies go through one collision in their life time but seeing as a galaxy's life is quite long, this is the first one that was seen, and it was discovered in 1785 by Sir Frederich Wilhelm Herschel. It is suspected that our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide with Andromeda since it is the closest to us and we are gradually moving more toward it.

It is assumed that they two galaxies were separate 1.2 billion years ago, one being a spiral galaxy, the other being a barred spiral galaxy.

It's a pretty nifty and interesting sight, is it not? When I saw the picture in class I knew I was going to do an entry on it because of how it fascinated me. It's the most unique, and thus my favoirte galaxy. Besides our own, of course.

Pretty Pieces

Pieces, the fish, is my own astrological sign, and no matter what it may say about my personality and my fortune and all of that gibberish, no matter how good, I refuse to beleive it. There's lots of pretty pictures of the fish out there, and the constellation in our night's sky... but that's about it.

The word itself, pieces is latin for fish (surprise, surprise!) and as far as mythology goes, the constellation respresents two round objects tied to either ends of a string. In one version Aphrodite and her son, Eros, transformed into these fish to escape the monstrous Typhon. They were tied together with a cord so that they wouldn't lose each other.

The meteor shower that appears to come from the direction of the constellation is named Piscids and of its TWENTY-ONE stars (that's a hefty number for a constellation) it contains one Messier object (a.k.a. really special thing in the sky). However, good on the guys who named Pieces because it actually does look like two things connected by string that could easily be fish because of the more rounded ends of the V-shaped constellation. The only reason I can think of that normalcy is the possibility that when Pieces was found they had run out of wine.

Cancer

Cancer, in latin, means crab (obviously). The above pictue is its astrological symbol but nothing close to what the constellation looks like. The five stars of the constellation are 'Y' shaped and may not look like a crab... but I'll refrain from making yet another comment on the amount of ethanolized grape juice that was very likely consumed during the naming of MANY constellations. The reason, however, for me choosing to write on this object is that it is my mother's astrological sign.

In history, the crab was supposed to distract Hercules from a fight with Hydra (the multi-headed monster). When Hera's attempt was shattered (litterally) once the crab was stepped on by the hero, she put the crustacean in the sky as a reward.

Being a Zodiac constellation, cancer lies upon the ecliptic plane (the plane in which the planets and sun of our galaxy lie upon so precisely that it's as if they were resting on a table, besides a few minor details). The constellation lies near the planetary system 55 Cnc, which is a quintruplet planet system, where there are four gas giants and one terrestrial planet.

In the Spotlight of the Universe

Or at least it would be if other life existed.

P/Comet Holmes, the most incredible comet we've yet seen. In a matter of hours this comet went from brightness +17 to +3. For those of you who aren't sure what this means, it means that in a matter of hours it became 400,000 times brighter than it originally was.

Why? Your guess is as good as everyone else's.

• Did it lose it's outer crust and therefore break off dirty ice to reveal cleaner ice beneath it which would catch the sun's light better?
• Did it hit an asteroid, resulting in fragmentation and the pieces lost their dirty layer?
• Was there a build up of gas inside that burst through the crust?
• Did it impact the meteor stream?
• Were there chemical reactions in the nucleus that disrupted the comet?

God only knows... and in the meantime they astronomers try to guess.

This little dude, who was originally more faint, was discovered by Edwin Holmes after a much smaller outburst on November 16, 1982. It was closest to the sun on May 4, 2007 so now it's heading back out, and astronomers are using this to search for a tail. Comets have tails from gas and dust that point in the opposite direction of the sun, so we know where to look for the tail and from more recent pictures it seems that one is starting to show. A very distinct tail while Holmes is still this bright = VERY happy astronomers.

Let's keep our fingers crossed for a still-bright comet and significant tail sighting!

The Life of Our Sun

Well I must admit, it was an extremely interesting topic to me when it was covered in class and so I decided to make a blog entry about it.

Our sun. We depend on it a great deal, like our existence for example. The crappy part? Our big ball of burning Hydrogen and He has a clock on it. Keep your socks on, though, because this clock we're talking about will only go off by the time that you're long gone. To be honest, Jesus will probably have returned by then.

You might be asking, 'How in the heck did you figure out that the sun's going to stop burning and then find the time in which it's going to happen?' Well, my friend, it's called nuclear fusion. That's what keeps our sun burning and like every fire, it needs fuel to keep burning. Thanks to the world-renowned equation of E=mc² we can find out how fast the sun is using up it's Hydrogen and Helium. Once all of the nasty mathematical stuff is through (which I won't include on this blog), we come up with a number like 10 million years. Yes, there is still 10 million years until the sun turns into a Red Giant a.k.a. Earth-is-Toast Time.

10 million years is a long time to be quite frank. Long enough for our family names to go out of existence and the human race to kill itself, long enough for us to find Vulcans and Borg out in the universe and most certainly long enough for the Jesus to come back. Am I worried? Heck no, I was powdering my nose in class when he mentioned that and I didn't even blink (although I found the equations pretty nifty and was surprised by how easy it was to figure out).

What is a Red Giant? It's a massive star that's near the end of it's life and decreases in temperature and greatly increases in both size and luminosity (brightness). When our sun becomes a Red Giant it will be roughly 100X larger and 1000X brighter, which means that it could very well expand enough to engulf Mercury and maybe even Venus. I hope those astronomers are taking all of the pictures that they can, they've only got 10 million years before we might lose two planets!

There's loads of more information on Wikipedia about the sun, which includes three potential problems with our big burning center of the universe; one of which I just mentioned in minor detail. You've got 10 million years, might as well take a look.

Europe on the Earth, Europa in Outer Space

Ah, Europa. When we look at our own moon and then take a peak at the fourth largest of Jupiter we see a good number of differences.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, those brown gashes across the icy surface are silicate rock; what the moon is primarily composed of. Why are there no craters? Not only is there ice on this baby, there's water, so there aren't any craters left behind, it gets filled in and re-frozen after any collisions. Neato!

She's got a diameter of 3000 km and is the sixth largest moon in the entire solar system (just beneath ours, of course). Galileo found her in January of 1610

That suspected ocean beneath the ice layer is quite fascinating, I must say. With an energy source of tidal heating, no wonder there's thought of the possibility of life being on this special moon. That heat keeps the water liquid and makes a high possibility of geological activity. Imagine? A world of water beneath that surface of ice and rock? Reminds me of something we'd see in Star Trek and it's in our own solar system.

I was surprised to find out that Europa's name wasn't used for a period of time after it's designation and was instead called Jupiter II. How boring. I know I wouldn't like it if I was called Hollett IV just because my parents didn't feel like calling me by my name for a couple of years. Terrible. Too much wine, probably. Thankfully, in the 20th century, they put the bottles back in the cellar and decided to call her (and a few other Galilean satellites) by her proper name. She was called Jupiter II because she was the second satellite to be found orbiting Jupiter. Later on, four more were found and were actually closer to the massive gas giant, and she was then demoted to sixth position. But she's still called Jupiter II. They took away her name but won't change it to make it appropriate again. *Sigh*

As one of the smoothest objects in the solar system, Europa's albedo (light reflectivity) is one of the highest for satellites at 0.64 due to it's icy surface. That's pretty darn bright; no wonder we can see it from Earth on a good clear night.

The Smaller Ice Giant

That is, the eighth planet; beautiful Neptune. In grade six I did a project on this blue gas giant and so I've decided to re-visit it and write a blog for my astronomy class.

This blue beaut is named after the Roman god of the sea. The trident above is that of Poseidon's, which is the planet's symbol. I had no idea planets had symbols, go figure.

Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth but only 1/18th of Jupiter's mas. It's near-twin, Uranus, being 14. Neptune's density is greater because of the fact that it's volume is less than the other blue gas giant. It's the furthest planet from the sun in our solar system (*cough* stupid definition of a planet *cough*), the fourth largest in diameter, and third largest in mass.

The methane in it's mostly hydrogen and helium atmosphere is what gives it the beautiful blue colour. Its winds gail at up to 2100 km/h, making it the planet with the strongest winds in the solar system, and are generally located in the massive storm in its southern hemisphere; the Great Dark Spot. The temperature at the top of its clouds has been measured at -218 degrees C, one of the coldest in the solar system but that only makes sense because it's the furthest from the sun (*cough* besides poor Pluto *cough*). The core of the planet is, of course, a great deal hotter, at about 7000 degrees C.

It was discovered on September 23, 1846 by three astronomers; Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams, and Johann Galle (but apparently Galileo viewed it in 1612 but he mistook it as a fixed star). Voyager 2 was the only spacecraft to visit it, and flew past the last gas giant on August 25, 1989.

Thirteen satellites circle Neptune, Triton being the largest of them. It's the only one of Neptune's moons large enough to be spherical and was discovered 17 days after the planet itself. There is thought that Triton was once a Kuiper Belt object before it was captured by Neptune's gravitational field. The cool part about the names of Neptune's moons is that since the planet itself is named after the great god of the sea, they are all named after lesser sea gods. I enjoyed that creativity of the astronomers who found them. There was definitely wine involved with the naming of the constellations but not so much with the naming of the planets and their moons.

Though it may not be visible in very many of the pictures (and not in the ones I have placed above), our lovely Neptune has rings! They are (obviously) much less substantial than those of Saturn, but they are azure in colour and are slightly "clumpy". This could be the result of the slight gravitational pulls from the orbiting moons but it's not certain.

There's definitely lots more to be discussed about the pretty blue gas giant (that's clouds aren't boring to look at) but I'll end my blurb for now. Wikipedia is where I got this information and there's plenty left if you're interested to take a look! Good old Neptune, the most respected and feared of gods next to Zeus, and the most beautiful planet next to Earth. Well, someone has to come in second place.