Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:...Which is why I was skeptical in my original post. You can just say it's extremely unlikely or impossible and I'm good with that.

drollere wrote:

geckzilla wrote:Of course, but I was thinking more about one that had come to a sort of stable state with the two cores still intact.

occam recommends that you go with something simple until the data force you to contrive something more complicated. the image is pretty fuzzy, and the galaxies are pretty far away, one galaxy could be superimposed on the other, or those detached spiral arms could show a tidal effect. somewhere in apod is a composite image of many colliding galaxies; good basis for comparison.

geckzilla wrote:Of course, but I was thinking more about one that had come to a sort of stable state with the two cores still intact.

drollere wrote:

geckzilla wrote:Check this out. This is at the top of the deep field image. It's probably just two objects overlapping, but wouldn't it be interesting if there was a spiral galaxy with two distinct cores? Someone will probably come along and tell me it's not possible.

colliding galaxies, galaxies fusing through mutual gravitational attraction, are not at all uncommon.

geckzilla wrote:Check this out. This is at the top of the deep field image. It's probably just two objects overlapping, but wouldn't it be interesting if there was a spiral galaxy with two distinct cores? Someone will probably come along and tell me it's not possible.

geckzilla wrote:I have been wondering since I read this what the colors do mean in the image. I knew already that the colors were assigned. The explanation suggests that all the deep, dim, red objects are the farthest away. This causes one to assume that the less red, orange colored ones aren't as far, and then yellow ones are even less far, and then the white ones are the closest. But the quote above makes me wonder if my assumption is true? Is it only the dark red ones which are known to be far and then the others have an unknown distance? I'm probably lacking some fundamental understanding which is blocking me on this.

bystander wrote:

HubbleSite.org wrote:The photo was taken with the new WFC3/IR camera on Hubble in late August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye.

casusbelli wrote:re: today's APD, I understand why (according to Big Bangers) the "faint red smudges" are very distant and so red-shifted. But...what then are the more numerous faint WHITE smudges? Tiny but closer galaxies? Look at the picture... New class of objects? Why aren't they all red-shifted? They sure aren't foreground bodies.

APOD Robot wrote:... the deepest near-infrared image of the sky ever ...

HubbleSite.org wrote:The photo was taken with the new WFC3/IR camera on Hubble in late August 2009 during a total of four days of pointing for 173,000 seconds of total exposure time. Infrared light is invisible and therefore does not have colors that can be perceived by the human eye. The colors in the image are assigned comparatively short, medium, and long, near-infrared wavelengths (blue, 1.05 microns; green, 1.25 microns; red, 1.6 microns). The representation is "natural" in that blue objects look blue and red objects look red. The faintest objects are about one-billionth as bright as can be seen with the naked eye.

casusbelli wrote:Art/neufer-
can you give me a link or reference to that last sentence? I'm not in-the-know on that subtopic. thanks, c

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe wrote:
Size of the observable universe

<<The Universe has expanded to 1292 times the size it was when the CMBR photons were released. Hence, the most distant matter that is observable at present, 46 billion light-years away, was only 36 million light-years away from the matter that would eventually become Earth when the microwaves we are currently receiving were emitted.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift wrote:
Extragalactic observations

<<The most distant objects exhibit larger redshifts corresponding to the Hubble flow of the universe. The largest observed redshift, corresponding to the greatest distance and furthest back in time, is that of the cosmic microwave background radiation; the numerical value of its redshift is about z = 1089 (z = 0 corresponds to present time), and it shows the state of the Universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and 379,000 years after the initial moments of the Big Bang.>>

John Carswell wrote:Please forgive my ignorance. I have no education in astronomy. I just look at APOD with my first coffee and pipe every morning to keep a perspective on life. I have always wondered; If the light we see was emitted by these galaxies 15 billion years ago and the universe was smaller fifteen billion years ago, why don't they appear to be much closer?

casusbelli wrote:re: today's APD, I understand why (according to Big Bangers) the "faint red smudges" are very distant and so red-shifted. But...what then are the more numerous faint WHITE smudges? Tiny but closer galaxies? Look at the picture... New class of objects? Why aren't they all red-shifted? They sure aren't foreground bodies.