When beauty and science collide (this is almost as awesome as me)

[The Straight Story]

When beauty and science collide

I’ve been posting a lot of nice astronomical images lately, but sometimes one comes along and blows me completely away. How fantastically gorgeous is this?

Holy Haleakala!

That spiral galaxy is NGC 6872, and as you can see in this image from the Gemini South telescope it’s getting its clock cleaned by the littler spiral — IC 4970 — just to the right. The two are undergoing a galactic collision, a colossal event playing out over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 6872 is currently the victim here; its spiral arms are clearly distorted and being flung wide by the gravitational interaction. However, the smaller IC 4970 will be the ultimate loser in this battle: it will fall into the bigger galaxy, be torn apart, and eventually consumed in its entirety, becoming a part of NGC 6872. Bigger galaxies do this to smaller ones all the time; the Milky Way is in the process of eating several small galaxies even as you read this (I have details in articles linked below; see Related Posts).

This pair has been observed by other telescopes, including the composite picture here of images by the Spitzer Space Telescope (which sees in the infrared), The Very Large Telescope (visible light), and Chandra (X-rays), which I rotated to match the Gemini shot and rescaled a bit.



http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/31/when-beauty-and-science-collide/

[tridim]

1. Well, beauty, science and a little photoshop work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they add the lens flares, but it would still be a beautiful image without them.

[The Straight Story]

2. Those are the flashlights of angels

:)

[AnneD]

3. Absolutely.....

EOM.

[n2doc]

4. Ahem. A bit more was posted on this before...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x77536

For the second consecutive year, high school students from across Australia joined in a competition to obtain scientifically useful (and aesthetically pleasing) images using the Gemini Observatory. The spectacular result of this contest, organized by the Australian Gemini Office (AusGO), is revealed here. As the 2010 winning student team suggested, Gemini targeted an interacting galaxy pair which, they assured, “would be more than just a pretty picture.”

The team, made up of students from the Sydney Girls High School (SGHS) Astronomy Club in central Sydney, proposed that Gemini investigate the galaxy pair NGC 6872 and IC 4970 (see Figure 1). The two galaxies are embraced in a graceful galactic dance that, as the team described in the essay to support their entry, “…will also serve to illustrate the situation faced by the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy in millions of years.”

The Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), in its imaging mode on the Gemini South telescope in Chile, collected the photons for the stunning new image. At an event held at SGHS on March 22, 2011 (see Figure 2), the winning team and teachers viewed the image for the first time and filled the room with “oohs” and “aahs” when Christopher Onken (Australian National University/AusGO) unveiled it. Assisting Onken, Angel López-Sánchez (Australian Astronomical Observatory/Macquarie University) highlighted many features of the image and explained galaxy interactions using computer animations and simulations.


It is really cool that these students got to do this.