Starship Asterisk*

I,m not quite sure how to word this, but i,ll try my best. With the countless stars in a given galaxy all bound together by gravity, I find it very interesting that the gravitational "plane" these stars are all orbiting around differ in terms of their hypothetical ground plane.

I guess what I am getting at, is why do we see some, say, ring galaxies head on, while others we see from the side, and are oriented completely different? What is up in one galaxy, is left or right in another.

such as the difference between - and |

where - and | represent galaxies

While its quite obvious the universe has many different planes, what determines whether gravity will pull(orient) stars along the x,y or z axis.

I hope that made sense.

Are you asking at why some galaxies spin into spirals and others orbit in elliptical fashion? Or is it that there is more observed chaos in the structure of the universe with respect to the orientation of galaxies vs the directions of their rotation?

Don't forget, even within our own galaxy, the plane of the solar system is angled to the plane of the galaxy, and further, the orbital angle of minor planets beyond Neptune is angled to the plane of the solar system.

So I guess CHAOS is the universal ORDER of things.

I think the question is why are spiral galaxies not all oriented in parallel planes.

We cannot see the entire universe from earth, but we can see a spherical portion of the universe from our vantage point with a radius of about 12.7 billion light years. Imagine if we did a survey of all the visible galaxies from earth within this vast sphere and discovered that all the spiral galaxies were oriented parallel to each other!! Like fish swimming together up a stream. Now THAT would take some explaining!! It would be like throwing a million pennies on the floor and having them all come up "heads".

I think we see galaxies oriented in all planes because of entropy and the turbulent movement of matter in all planes, which is necessary to explain the random distribution of matter in our observable sphere. Also galaxies near each other interact gravitationally and twist, distort, orbit, combine,and re-combine chaotically. It would be hard to envision galaxies all maintaining the same orientaion for 12.7 billion years while all this is going on. We see galaxies at different points in time. A galaxy one billion light years away from is seen in the orientation it held one billion years ago. Also some hold that space over 12.7 billion light years is not linear but curved, and that should seriously distort the orientation of objects viewed from across the cosmos.

goredsox wrote:I think the question is why are spiral galaxies not all oriented in parallel planes.

We cannot see the entire universe from earth, but we can see a spherical portion of the universe from our vantage point with a radius of about 12.7 billion light years. Imagine if we did a survey of all the visible galaxies from earth within this vast sphere and discovered that all the spiral galaxies were oriented parallel to each other!! Like fish swimming together up a stream. Now THAT would take some explaining!! It would be like throwing a million pennies on the floor and having them all come up "heads".
.

Great analogy with the pennies, you understood my question perfectly! Although some of these pennies would land on their edges, or at weird angles!!

BMAONE, i,m sure you have seen the cosmos series, episode 10 (edge of forever) I watch at least once a month, I will NEVER get sick of watching those computer representations of galaxies coming in close proximity to one another, and how they form the shapes that they do.

gored you bring up a good point about our view of the universe distorting over such a tremendously large distance, and galaxies colliding. But I still have the nagging question of is what orienting gravity in space, besides large massive bodies. Why would the gravitational pull of one galaxy differ in the orientation of its pull from another?

When I try to picture this, I imagine a 3D grid, with say our sun in the middle, since its the heaviest it pulls on the grid, and other near by planets in to its orbit. I guess thinking about it like that is what confuses me, shouldn't gravity be uniform across the cosmos!

You bet it should be, we are all being tricked by these “so called ” astrophysicists that post on this site. Just look at this statement taken from the context of another topic on this site, It this doesn’t say it all, nothing ever will.
The topic. SOHO Anomaly
The question. What was that object that moved across the cameras view.
The honest opinion of one such learned person that uses this site “ makc “

It was alien ship, man, it is clear as day! They teleported here by mistake, and once they realized that, they teleported back to wherever they came from. Dark remnants are probably products of ship systems, like gases, or liquid suspension, or dust... Easiest explanation possible!

The reply to that from someone calling themselves a Mike Mozina, but obviously representing the dark side coma coma coma coma coma coma

That's all well and good for you, but disinformation ministers like myself are sworn to keep the aliens a secret by spreading obvious scientific lies


I never met a weapon i didn't like (1989 ) Ronald Raygun

Another related question...
Do galaxies tumble in space as well?
If we look at M51 (for example) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060219.html We see it as an ACL rotating galaxy. Is it also, aside from rotating, tumbling through space so that in say 175,000,000 years we might see it as edge on then in another 175,000,000 years we might see it as CL rotating?

THX1138 (nice handle)
Don't forget, many things said here ARE in jest. MAKC comes up with some GERAT one liners and Zingers. Some posters just forget the smiley

I'm pretty sure the models of colliding galaxies show some tumbling, if not shearing, movements. In fact, colliding galaxies supposedly pass through each other and change shape drastically and even combine into one galaxy sometimes, according to computer models.

I'm not sure if non-colliding, non-orbiting galaxies tumble. I'm not even sure that spiral galaxies spin either. I have read a theory, called the Density Wave Theory, that the spiral arms of galaxies do NOT actually represent orbital movements of stars around the center of the galaxy, but instead represent moving waves of star formation propogating around the center of the galaxy.

But I still have the nagging question of is what orienting gravity in space, besides large massive bodies. Why would the gravitational pull of one galaxy differ in the orientation of its pull from another?

Purely conjecture, but maybe the engine that determines the angle of the galaxy disk is some sort of spin orientation of a very massive object at the center, such as a black hole.

Thats an interesting theory, if galaxies are tumbling though should we not see some movement over a long period of time? Also what would they tumbling towards? I tthink if galaxies were spinning on more than one axis, it would be fairly apparent, even though it would probably take billions of years to complete a cycle.

Also thank you for your responses

Vision, I don't think we've had telescopes that are capable of letting us view other galaxies for long enough to observe it. Even if we had telescopes 10,000 years ago, cameras didn't get invented until just a few hundred years ago, and photographic cameras only started to come around a little over a hundred years ago...

And then, how many years ago did we have camera equipment capable of taking good quality, high resolution images of those galaxies that would be needed to later make a comparison to note any change? Assuming we had a good photo of a galaxy 100 years ago, the paper and colors would have shifted and decayed now to the point it would be impossible to discern changes against a modern day photo.

But, even then, assuming we had a perfect image of a galaxy from 100 years ago, I wonder if 100 years is enough time to see it. And I wonder how hard it'd be to tell if it was us or the galaxy we were trying to look at doing most of the movement. I bet there's someone out there trying this already. Better have a few generations of people ready to take a photo of the same thing every night.

Hello All

For general information


Galaxy Evolution
http://www.galex.caltech.edu/

http://www.shef.ac.uk/physics/teaching/ ... mary9.html
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/index.html

The Hubble Tuning Fork
http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en/proj/basic/g ... ngfork.asp
This is interesting reading in the evolution of galaxy forms.

Formation of galaxies.
http://cosmicweb.uchicago.edu/gal.html

http://cosmicweb.uchicago.edu/group.html

Over a 12 Gyr period you will get large changes. Even the formation of a new galaxy.

geckzilla wrote:Vision, I don't think we've had telescopes that are capable of letting us view other galaxies for long enough to observe it. Even if we had telescopes 10,000 years ago, cameras didn't get invented until just a few hundred years ago, and photographic cameras only started to come around a little over a hundred years ago...

And then, how many years ago did we have camera equipment capable of taking good quality, high resolution images of those galaxies that would be needed to later make a comparison to note any change? Assuming we had a good photo of a galaxy 100 years ago, the paper and colors would have shifted and decayed now to the point it would be impossible to discern changes against a modern day photo.

But, even then, assuming we had a perfect image of a galaxy from 100 years ago, I wonder if 100 years is enough time to see it. And I wonder how hard it'd be to tell if it was us or the galaxy we were trying to look at doing most of the movement. I bet there's someone out there trying this already. Better have a few generations of people ready to take a photo of the same thing every night.

100 years is nothing, and I realize that our species is so young, and if galaxies were falling...I think the precision and grace of planetary orbit would most likely be lost, no?.

Gravity in space still bothers me though, especially as it seems to be present everywhere, yet not oriented.

Some galaxies do appear to "tumble" the case I know about is NGC 524, is obvious when you look at it it is a face on S0, essentially a dead spiral galaxy, you can see the residual spiral structure. However when you measure the velocity of different parts of the galaxy (as the SAURON collaboration did) you can see that one side is approaching and the other receding, so this galaxy from our point of view does appear to be tumbing.

astro_uk wrote:Some galaxies do appear to "tumble" the case I know about is NGC 524, is obvious when you look at it it is a face on S0, essentially a dead spiral galaxy, you can see the residual spiral structure. However when you measure the velocity of different parts of the galaxy (as the SAURON collaboration did) you can see that one side is approaching and the other receding, so this galaxy from our point of view does appear to be tumbing.

Tumbling or spinning on multiple axis's? Tumbling makes me think falling =/