Courtesy of Hubble/European Space Agency and NASA
Posted on 10/12/2013 6:21:15 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Lying more than 110 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Antlia (The Air Pump) is the spiral galaxy IC 2560, shown here in an image from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. At this distance, it is a relatively nearby spiral galaxy, and is part of the Antlia cluster -- a group of over 200 galaxies held together by gravity. This cluster is unusual; unlike most other galaxy clusters, it appears to have no dominant galaxy within it.
In this image, it is easy to spot IC 2560's spiral arms and barred structure. This spiral is what astronomers call a Seyfert-2 galaxy, a kind of spiral galaxy characterized by an extremely bright nucleus and very strong emission lines from certain elements -- hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and oxygen. The bright center of the galaxy is thought to be caused by the ejection of huge amounts of super-hot gas from the region around a central black hole.
There is a story behind the naming of this quirky constellation -- Antlia was originally named antlia pneumatica by French astronomer Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, in honor of the invention of the air pump in the 17th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificcomputing.com ...
Courtesy of Hubble/European Space Agency and NASA
Thanks null and void for the link, a very nice extra to APoD.
I wonder if that was where Betty and Barney Hill were taken that night in september 1961
Very Nice! :-)
Alas, they didn’t go any further than inside the ship. “What is yellow?”
The UFO incident
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH5YRtcgzQ4
Interesting concepts, these...what's 1 light year? 6 trillion miles, something like that. What's 110 million times 6 trillion?
It says right here, that's a lot!
Shucks, I go there for lunch sometimes, it's so close.
and they’ve got better telescopes pointing down
every unshielded electronic signal would be theirs for the taking... if they focused the area. soon, if not already, they will record all areas and decipher later (like AT&T recording all calls since 1987 and only now processing them with DEA)
The answer to your query is 6.6 quintillion.
:)
seriously though... how can we get that level of detail from something that far away? if we can get that detail from millions of LIGHT YEARS away... what kind of detail can we get from just 10 miles? what other emissions can they gather? every sound... every electronic vibration... etc
If you mean on Earth, surveillance technology has been improving at the same rate as Moore’s Law, nothing surprising about that.
This concept always fascinates.
We're 14 billion light years from the edge of the Universe. Does that mean the Universe in 28 billion light years in diameter?
What lies 14 billion light years plus 1 inch from my location?
We aren't at the center of the Universe. We aren't even at the center of our own galaxy.
Yet, galaxies are flying away from us at increasing speed in every direction. The last star of the farthest are about 14 billion light years away. Doesn't that, by definition, put us at the center?
There is no Center.
You are the center of your Universe. I am the center of mine.
“The last star of the farthest are about 14 billion light years away. Doesn’t that, by definition, put us at the center?”
In an infinite universe, any point in space would be the center if you were standing there, from your perspective.
The observable universe is about 90 billion light years in diameter. If spacetime is as flat as it appears to be, the whole universe is many orders of magnitude larger if not actually infinite.
IC 2560 has
Right ascension
10h 16m 18.666s
Declination
−33° 33′ 49.85″
... putting it just to the lower left of center on this sky chart.
Technically we are at the center of our universe. The edge of the Universe is defined by the beginning of time as we know it. The more distant an object is, the more time has passed as the light from the object travels to reach us. Right now it looks like there is a curtain of glowing gas roughly equidistant corresponding to a time roughly 14 billion years ago. This represents the point in time corresponding to the universe cooling below the temperature of luminous plasma. The inference is this corresponds to about 385,000 years after the Big Bang, the implied beginning of our universe.
All theory of course, but works fairly well for the nonce. So in a funny sort of way, the Big Bang and Cosmological Inflation as well as Relativity have unwound the Copernican Revolution, we're back in the center of the universe again. Of course, no matter where you are, it looks the same. You are always in the center of the universe you perceive. Weirdness.
...it's a number smaller than the debt limit Dems want.
Looks like a celestial crown!
Looks like a celestial swirlie!
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