Galaxies
Category archives for Galaxies
Messier Monday: The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, M83
Posted by Ethan on January 21, 2013 
“Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it.” -Vaclav Havel But the spiral is more than a metaphor or a mathematical shape, it’s also the most common feature observed in the galaxies out there in the Universe. There are 27 spiral galaxies…
The Last Refuge of a Science-Denying Scoundrel
Posted by Ethan on January 11, 2013 
“Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.” – Samuel Johnson I have a six-sided die. I’m going to roll it ten times, and record each roll. And when I’m done, I’m going to have an incredibly rare, bet-you-can’t-reproduce-it result!…
How Many Planets Are In The Universe?
Posted by Ethan on January 5, 2013 
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” -Ray Bradbury It wasn’t all that long ago — back when I was a boy — that the only planets we knew of were the ones in…
The Universe Beyond Our Reach
Posted by Ethan on December 28, 2012 
“People hear the happy story, but the truth is they could all disappear in the blink of an eye. The threats just keep coming.” -Todd Steiner It’s taken generations of scientists, examining the night sky for millennia, to comprehend the full size and scope of what’s out there in the Universe. Out beyond the planets and…
A relic from the primitive Universe… in our own backyard!
Posted by Ethan on December 26, 2012 
“We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility of the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be…
Messier Monday: A Great Galactic Controversy, M102
Posted by Ethan on December 17, 2012 
“Men… have had the vanity to pretend that the world creation was made for them, whilst in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.” -Camille Flammarion Welcome to the latest — and most controversial – Messier Monday, where each week, I’ll take a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up…
So much more than an Atom Smasher
Posted by Ethan on December 6, 2012 
“Forget it. I didn’t have that thing inside me where I wanted to smash against somebody and watch them break. I was too sensitive for that and disliked being that sensitive.” -Josh Brolin How do you figure out what something is made of? You take it apart — cracking it open if necessary — and…
Giving thanks for our place in the Universe
Posted by Ethan on November 21, 2012 
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing…
Messier Monday: Bode’s Galaxy, M81
Posted by Ethan on November 19, 2012 
“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” -Kalpana Chawla Welcome to this week’s Messier Monday, where I pick a new object out of the original catalogue of 110 “faint fuzzies” designed to help comet-hunters avoid…
Every Galaxy will have New Stars for Trillions of Years!
Posted by Ethan on November 7, 2012 
“It’s a brilliant surface in that sunlight.” – Neil Armstrong Indeed, all that glitters so brilliantly in the cosmos does so because of the stars that have formed throughout it. Over the 14 billion-or-so years that our Universe has been around, we’ve formed hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone. Given that our…
