Esa / Hubble
Gravitational ripples point to dark matter's presence in the galactic cluster to the left. Gravitational lensing, by unseen objects, gives the impression of "looking at the pebbles on the bottom of a pond with ripples on the surface." I actually worked on images of this same cluster back in college, but my group was interested in finding far away quasars, using the galactic clusters as the objects responsible for the lensing, so that the very far away obects would be magnified (made brighter). In the colors simulated in this picture, red corresponds to objects expanding away from us, blue is shifting towards us, and green means the object is moving at the same rate with respect to our reference frame. Presumably, everything that's the same color belongs to that cluster, and things that are "redder" are further away. My group liked finding red quasars in a group of less red galaxies. The bluish cloud you see is not actually any kind of interstellar dust or matter, but actually a scattering of the light from the individual galaxies caused by the gravitational ripples from the dark matter. Very, very cool.
very, very cool indeed.
ReplyDeletejoe, i swear i'm not trying to flirt, but all this science talk makes my knees go weak.
i love the new color on your blog, too!
seriously. you need to be the astronomy teacher for english majors... teaching the concepts and the theories and the big stuff and the ideas and not making us memorize math formulas that will float right out of our heads as soon as the test is over.
(okay, your brother Pet may be the only english major on the planet who gets the math... but that's because he's a genius like you and Brother Placid.)
take my physics class in college. we learned the theories. not the math. (because God knows... what the hell does an English major need with math? quickbooks balances my checkbook.)
and every day of my physics class was a new epiphany: the relationship between light and sound; newton's laws and all that etcetera stuff. it was amazing and i still write poems based on what i learned in physics.
i love your blog.
Otta:
ReplyDeleteThank you for the kind words. Your knees should be glad that the fields of quantum mechanics and solid state mechanics don't make very nice pictures for the media to print, otherwise I'd be writing about them much more. My former field still knows how to bring in the grant money by making pretty pictures of their collected data. Theoretical physics kinda bit it in America thanks to Bill Clinton. Texas! No Superconducting Super Collider for you!
I like how the blue picture matches my blog's background too. It doesn't have to be substance over style; why not substance and style? Actually, I just like blue...
bill clinton! the fat big-mac-eating bastard!
ReplyDeleteyou know i'm from texas and i knew all about the super collider when i was young. and one of my good friends was from waxahachie. (i used to be much more political than i am now.)
theoretical physics is the BOMB, baby!
why not substance and style, indeed. this is why i have a MAC!
Otta:
ReplyDeletetheoretical physics is the BOMB, baby!
Hee hee! That's literally true. If you want a great lesson in nuclear physics, taken in its actual historical context, that book by Richard Rhodes is the best thing I can recommend. My classical mechanics professor was actually there at Los Alamos on loan from Cal Tech. He had great stories to tell about Oppenheimer and Feynman.
seriously, i thought the MAC comment would get you going, if anything would.
ReplyDeleteyou're not so easy to bait, are you?
Otta:
ReplyDeleteI take it as a matter of faith that Macs give equal attention to style and substance, but sometimes fall short on the substance.
Others are a little more vocal on how short the substance is on the Mac platform...
okay. i have to give it to you. that was the first total laugh out loud moment i've had in a few days.
ReplyDeletelike laugh out loud with some tears in my eyes because i'm laughing so hard.
well. the last time i laughed this hard was last week when a guy at work brought in little religious icons he got from a vending machine at cici's pizza.
they're like an inch and a half high and one of them is st. francis of assisi. and so the guy says "they're not religious icons. they're action figures!"
i have never laughed so hard as i did over the st. francis of assisi action figure.
st. francis of assisi action figure.
geez.
no mac and pc debate can come close to that. right?
Otta:
ReplyDeleteYou better watch out for St. Francis. He's like the reverse Aquaman. He can call animals to help him out, and he can fly! Well, when he prays real hard, he can fly, but still...
reverse aquaman?
ReplyDeleteWTH does that even mean? seriously.
Otta:
ReplyDeleteYou never watched the Justice League? C'mon! Aquaman! Swam in the ocean, talked with the fish, uh, that's about it, I guess.
But St. Francis does that stuff on land! Well, he doesn't swim through dirt, but through the air. Well, more like float in holy ecstasy. But don't count out the animal thing!
oh Joe. thanks. time for me to go to bed here on the east coast.
ReplyDeletebut i will go to sleep with a smile, thinking of St. Francis as the reverse Aquaman, floating through holy ecstasy.
thank you for making me smile a lot tonight. i needed some smiles.