Mar 19

Hubble Gazes on One Ring to Rule Them All

A white circular structure ringed with pink clusters of old stars, a bright star to the right and various distant galaxies

Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA

Galaxies can take many forms — elliptical blobs, swirling spiral arms, bulges, and disks are all known components of the wide range of galaxies we have observed using telescopes like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. However, some of the more intriguing objects in the sky around us include ring galaxies like the one pictured above — Zw II 28.

Ring galaxies are mysterious objects. They are thought to form when one galaxy slices through the disk of another, larger, one — as galaxies are mostly empty space, this collision is not as aggressive or as destructive as one might imagine. The likelihood of two stars physically colliding is minimal, and it is instead the gravitational effects of the two galaxies that cause the disruption.

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Mar 18

Quantum Entanglement Takes a Road Trip

I find Quantum Entanglement fascinating.

Mar 17

Saturn’s Moon Mimas

saturn-moon-mimas-death-star

Image Credit:NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Mimas (pronounced MY muss or MEE muss, adjective Mimantean) looks somewhat like a bull’s eye if viewed from a certain angle.(Or the Death Star if your a Star Wars Fan) The feature that causes this is the huge 140-kilometer-wide (88-mile) Herschel Crater, which is one-third the diameter of Mimas. If the object striking Mimas had been larger or been moving faster, Mimas would probably have been “disrupted” into pieces that might have collapsed back into a new moon or might have scattered into another ring of Saturn. The walls of Herschel Crater are approximately 5 kilometers (3 miles) high, parts of the floor are approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep, and the central peak towers are almost 6 kilometers (4 miles) above the floor of the crater. A comparable crater on Earth would be 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) in diameter.

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