Starship Asterisk*

JohnD wrote:I share Guest's confusion! […] And a Google for other images of 1512 find it as an oval, angulated as seen from Earth, with a distinct bar, no dust lanes and wide spiral arms, not an outer ring. See: http://www.billionsandbillions.com/ngc_1512.html

Guest wrote:I deeply appreciate that I am the duffer in this flight, but the assertion that "dust continues to spiral right into the very center" of this galaxy defies basic observational logic. I know what I am about to suggest completely defies current thinking, but it looks to me that the brilliant area in the center of this galaxy is the SOURCE of the material in the arms of the galaxy. It looks like a lawn sprinkler shooting out water. I know the universe is stranger than we can imagine, but isn't the physics we experience down here the same as what we observe out there?

Ann wrote:
Those inner stellar rings are not entirely uncommon. Of course, they are mostly seen in barred galaxies, and M94 is not barred. But NGC 1512 is. And barred spirals sometimes have both an inner and an outer ring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_94 wrote:

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<<Messier 94 (also known as NGC 4736) contains both an inner ring with a diameter of 70 arcseconds and an outer ring with a diameter of 600 arcseconds. The inner ring is the site of strong star formation activity and is sometimes referred to as a starburst ring. This star formation is fueled by gas that is dynamically driven into the ring by the inner oval-shaped bar-like structure. There are several possible external events that could have led to the origin of M94's outer disk including the accretion of a satellite galaxy or the gravitational interaction with a nearby star system. However, further research found problems with each of these scenarios. Therefore, the report concludes that the inner disk of M94 is an oval distortion which led to the creation of this galaxy's peripheral disk.

A study was published in 2008 showing that M94 had very little or no dark matter present. The study analyzed the rotation curves of the galaxy's stars and the density of hydrogen gas and found that ordinary luminous matter appeared to account for all of the galaxy's mass. This result has yet to be confirmed or accepted by other research groups, however, and has not actually been tested against the predictions of standard galaxy formation models.>>

When two comparably sized galaxies (e.g., Andromeda & the Milky Way) collide
what prevents their dark matter from elastically escaping into space
and leave their disturbed in-elastically colliding gases behind

Guest wrote:Terrible apod. The explanation didn't make sense until I found the picture of the entire galaxy which this is part of. They should have posted that picture instead or posted a split screen with both.

JohnD wrote: I share Guest's confusion! The blurb just doesn't match the image shown as today's APOD, or the galaxies that the blurb links to! It just doesn't look like a barred galaxy - no bar! - and nothing like the example NGC 1672. ...

APOD Robot wrote: ...
This bar crosses an outer ring, though, a ring not seen as it surrounds the pictured region. Featured in this Hubble Space Telescope image is an inner ring -- one that itself surrounds the nucleus of the spiral. ...

bystander wrote:
I think maybe you just aren't parsing the blurb correctly.
I think it clearly states that this is just the central region of NGC 1512.

• [list]"Parsing the Blurb"

Guest wrote: The explanation didn't make sense until I found the picture of the entire galaxy which this is part of. They should have posted that picture instead or posted a split screen with both.

neufer wrote: ... warped Tennyson ...

MarkBour wrote:

neufer wrote:
... warped Tennyson ...

Nice. Not a poem I'd read before, but it seems it could be fit to a galactic encounter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon#Poetry wrote:
<<Vogon poetry is described as "the third worst poetry in the Universe" (behind that of the Azgoths of Kria; four members of an audience died of internal haemorrhaging during a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" while the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos himself was later killed by his own major intestine, which leaped up through his neck and throttled his brain when he attempted to read his twelve-book epic "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles". Their poetry was also behind that of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex, which was destroyed when the Earth was.)>>

geoffrey.landis wrote:

Guest wrote: The explanation didn't make sense until I found the picture of the entire galaxy which this is part of. They should have posted that picture instead or posted a split screen with both.

Absolutely agree-- without the context (https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla ... otostream/), the APoD image zoomed in to just the nucleus is pretty much uncomprehensible.
(I think it would also be useful if the APoD had pointed out that this is from a UV survey, and hence the colors shown are most likely UV-- older stars are not going to show up very brightly in the image.)

geckzilla wrote:Regarding the confusion of the APOD, I must also note that I found it difficult to post about both of the images in a way that was not momentarily confusing. The fact that the galaxy has two rings and that Hubble is looking at it so closely does make it disorienting. I just wish figuring it out made people happy instead of annoyed.

geckzilla wrote:

geoffrey.landis wrote:
-- without the context (https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla ... otostream/), the APoD image zoomed in to just the nucleus is pretty much uncomprehensible.

Regarding the confusion of the APOD, I must also note that I found it difficult to post about both of the images in a way that was not momentarily confusing. The fact that the galaxy has two rings and that Hubble is looking at it so closely does make it disorienting. I just wish figuring it out made people happy instead of annoyed.

https://alexpolistigers.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/cant-see-the-wood-for-the-trees/ wrote:
Glossologics: Can’t see the Wood for the Trees
September 6, 2013 by alexpolistigers

<<This expression, still popular today, has been in use in largely the same form for centuries. Many dictionaries trace it back as far as 1546, where it was recorded in John Heywood’s “Prouerbes in the English Tongue”. He wrote “Plentie is no deinte, ye see not your owne ease. I see, ye can not see the wood for trees.” However, in order for Heywood to include it in his work, it must have already been widely known and recognised, which of course gives us the first clue that there might be a longer history than at first thought.

An intriguing reference appears in a work by Thomas More, who was famously executed by King Henry VIII. This was the enormously titled “The second parte of the confutacion of Tyndals answere in whyche is also confuted the chyrche that Tyndale deuyseth. And the chyrche also that frere Barns deuyseth”, generally known simply as “The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer”, which is dated 1533, thus putting it 13 years before Heywood’s work.

Here’s the section, with the expression at the end: “Uery well declared, as though he wold tell vs that there were a woman that went inuysyble, and that he ment not that her handes, or her fete, or her hed, or any parte of her were inuysyble / but all her partes beynge vysyble, her self were yet inuysyble. And as he myght tell vs, that of Poules chyrch we may well se the stones, but we can not se the chyrce. And then we may well tell hym agayne, that he can not se the wood for the trees.” (p. ccccxxxvii, in Book VIII.)>>

JohnD wrote:
Is that you Art, making Tennyson turn in his grave? Nice one!

geckzilla wrote:I just wish figuring it out made people happy instead of annoyed.