Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Space Science

Space Pictures From Near and Far 185

Posted by timothy from the mostly-empty dept.
Buran writes: "The BBC News has a fine story about the how our galaxy looks from the outside according to the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS). The article describes the shape of our galaxy (a barred spiral; all those books showing concept paintings of a regular spiral galaxy will be out of date now) and how the survey was done (near-infrared measurements of 500 million carbon stars). For the first time, we can see the center of our own Milky Way. All our worldly troubles seem so small..." That takes care of the big picture; Chris McKinstry has submitted news of much closer but just as exciting shots of Saturn -- read below for more on those.

mindpixel writes: "I was very excited when I saw this amazing shot of Saturn come up on the control room monitors of the VLT in November, and I'm even more excited that as of today the image is finally public. It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory. All of us here at the observatory are quite proud of it, especially the NAOS-CONICA team."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Space Pictures From Near and Far More

Space Pictures From Near and Far

Comments Filter:

  • The title of this article proves my theory. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @09:29PM (#2935227) Homepage Journal
    Had the title been simply "Pictures From Near And Far", nobody would read it. But, the addition of "Space" makes it infinitely more attractive.

    Try it. Space Ice Cream. Yum! Ice Cream. Boring. Space Frisbee! Exciting! Frisbee. Dull, lifeless. Space Herpes! Oh, wait...

    - A.P.

  • All this trouble? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It suffices to travel toward the galactic north for 50,000 light-years or so and snap a picture. Gee, why all the effort?
  • To be honest, I was always a bit dissappointed that I wasn't living in a barred spiral. Turns out I am. Nifty. :)

  • Great pictures! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @09:32PM (#2935247)
    I can't wait until Cassini gets within range of Saturn, it is definitly one of the most amazing things in the sky. Unfornatually it's largly been ignored by many high-power telescopes and space probes.

    What NASA/ESA and all the other agencies in the world need to do is send out a swam of probes to *every* planet - a little science is better than no science!

    • And how many people do you think will be willing to pay for eight swarms of probes? afterall, someone has to.

      • Re:Great pictures! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:06PM (#2935377)
        True, but the various space agencies could spread the cost like they did with the International Space Station. I doubt if any one single country would/could have done that.

        USA/Russia could prove valuable help with there long experience in space. Europe could provide the launch vehicle. There are many other countries that could provide valuable help with the design and building of the actual probes. Help make them smaller and tougher than before.

        Missions like Cassini/Galelio are very expensive, but they are designed to stay in orbit for years. Look how much great data the Voyagers returned on there quick passes of each planet.

        Imagine the images Galelio could have given us if it had been in orbit when the string of comets hit! With small, replacable, probes constantly in orbit of the various planets we'd be much better placed to observe these extremly rare events. Then they send in the big missions, when they know it's worth it.

        • Imagine the images Galelio could have given us if it had been in orbit when the string of comets hit!

          Yeah, I can see it now..

          "sir, the comet images are extremely close range!".. "how close?" .. "inside the comet, sir"

          It's "galileo", btw..

        • Imagine the images Galelio could have given us if it had been in orbit when the string of comets hit!

          Um, it was.

      • I am (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 )
        You know, if the United States Federal Government would get off it's duff, reform the tax system and be a little more responsable with where it spends money there would be the dollars for these things.

        The EU won't foot the bill for a swarm of probes, so that leaves the US, Canada and Japan.

        However, if they scaled up production of these things, the economy of scale would kick in and the overall price of these beasties would drop.

        Right now, the probes are a one time knockoff and are as expensive as a Italian exotic sportscar is compared to a Lexus or Lincoln.
      • A few years ago, when everybody was downloading Mars pictures from the Rover (is the horse still there, by the way?), Jerry Pournelle (see www.byte.com [byte.com]) was suggesting an interesting way to fund these probes: ask everyone to donate 0.1 cents per downloaded picture (voluntarily). At 10 million downloads a day, this could add up to serious money.

        • Re:Great pictures! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by IronChef ( 164482 )

          It's a neat idea but "micropayments" are impossible/impractical with today's financial system. If there was an easy way to charge $0.001 for clicking on a link, it would have already taken the web by storm.

          Too bad, it WOULD be nice for a lot of things, but we're going to have to wait.

    • Re:Great pictures! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Witchblade ( 9771 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:09PM (#2935387) Homepage
      What NASA/ESA and all the other agencies in the world need to do is send out a swam of probes to *every* planet - a little science is better than no science!

      Yes, and I'm sure they'd love to do it. The problem, as always, is funding. In the early days of the Space Race Soviet and American taxpayers gladly ponied up the cash for spaceprobes, just for the bragging rights to be 'first'. After that was accomplished we've entered phase 2: probes can only get funding by exploiting the 'search for possible life' angle. We're throwing probe after probe at Mars (and consequently billions and billions of dollars) yet we haven't even seen Pluto.

      Quick and dirty Pluto flybys keep getting canceled almost as soon as any funding is approved, even though most of us working in the space sciences would gladly relocate funding from projects we're involved in just to get something simple like Pluto-Kuiper Express of the ground.

      The public won't have it, though. Now to explain why we should send a 'swarm' of spacecraft to places they've never heard of. We astronomers have the advantage of the huge amount of unknown in searching for planets. We can, in mostly good conscience, play the Lifecard in proposals to study any stellar phenomena. Geologists are stuck with just two at his point: Mars and Europa.

      Just think of all we don't know about our own moon. Where is the swarm of really cost-effective probes we could be sending there? The only time anyone took notice was when a military craft found very shaky evidence for a possible tiny bit of water in a shadow of a small crater near the pole. The only return visits under any serious consideration are desgined soley to test that finding.

      If any exobiologists are reading, all you need to do is come up with a convincing argument for micro-organism in Saturn's atmosphere and I have the suspicion that Slashdot readers will get all the pretty ring pictures their hearts' could desire. ;)

      • Imagine how many space probes the $50 billion extra, that George W wants to spend on making bombs and guns, could build and launch.

        The people in charge of this planet must be stupid. They devote all our resources to killing eachother or making crap TV programs and holywood schlock when they could be funding planetary exploration.

        Try justifying this expenditure to a child interested in astronomy.

        All those dumb American flags everyone bought after s11 could probably fund an inter-planetary probe... It's like the whole world is navel gazing when there is so much to see.

        • Imagine how many space probes the $50 billion extra, that George W wants to spend on making bombs and guns, could build and launch.

          None. Because without defense, there is no country to make the space probes.

          It's like the whole world is navel gazing when there is so much to see.

          Maybe you should stop gazing at your own navel and realize that there is more going on that your little pet interest.

          • Well I just happen to think that science, astronomy and the quest for knowledge is a better "pet interest" than building killing devices and using them on peasants in the third world while waving the "stars and stripes" so god damn close to your face that anyone who disagrees or dares to point out US hyprocrisy is part of the imaginary "Evil Axis".

            I fart in your general direction!

            • building killing devices and using them on peasants in the third world

              Again, maybe you should stop staring at your navel and become educated about world events. This is ludicrously wrong.

              imaginary "Evil Axis".

              I guess those 3000 people were imaginary, too. Let me guess: you are a fan of Chomsky, right? Here's a hint: He's a crackpot. But hey, you can believe what you want. But you'll be happier if you live in the real universe rather than Chomsky's mentally unbalanced one.

              • Care to back up that claim that Chomsky is "crackpot" with some facts proving this? Please quote sources.

                It's a sad day when seemingly intelligent people are so affectly by governmental propaganda to resort to baseless ad hominem attacks.

                • I'll be honest with you. I'm not trying to blow you off, but Chomsky is not worth my time to refute. If you search around on the Internet, you can find people with more energy than I have on this issue.

                  Here's one thing to think about: when someone is so over-the-top critical, and can't find ANYTHING to say that's good, that should be your signal that he's probably leaving out a lot of facts. Chomsky's great mental flaw is selective facts. He only selects facts that support his theories, but ignores anything that does not support his theories. Of course, using that method, you can prove just about anything and even claim a "factual" basis for the claims.

          • None. Because without defense, there is no country to make the space probes.

            You can't state that for a fact without trying it, i.e., abolish defense and see if the country survives.

            On a more serious note, how about $60 billion for a missile defense system that most likely will not work? Recent events have shown that there are more ways of attacking a country than just nuclear missiles. I think the $60 billion could be spent in a more useful way on space projects. Money goes to the same companies as the money for the missile shield (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.), so the only difference is that the money is spent on something useful.
      • The public won't have it, though.

        Who ARE these public? I hate them so much.

        I'm part of the "public", right? Or I used to think so, but now the more I hear about what *they* want and don't want, I'm lead to believe that they are all nitwits who couldn't tie thier own shoelaces and feed themselves if thier lives depended on it (which, since this "public" won't ever seem to just go ahead and die, I have to assume it does not).

        I believe the number one threat against America is NOT terrorism, it's the stupid and foolish.
      • We're throwing probe after probe at Mars (and consequently billions and billions of dollars) yet we haven't even seen Pluto.

        Well, it seems you have some expertise, so maybe you can enlighten me. Wouldn't a trip to Pluto take an awful long time, like 10+ years or so with all the laps around Jupiter and the Sun to gain speed? In our society, people want instant results. The moon is only a couple of days away, Mars several months, and that's about all the patience the average taxpayer has (maybe the time has to be shorter than the average politician's term in office...). Also, there might not be a convenient launch time any time soon, given Pluto's orbital period of 247 years and change?

        Then again, maybe that's an excellent argument to get funding: "Better launch it soon, folks, or else wait another 250 years".

  • Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xfs ( 473411 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @09:40PM (#2935276)
    Isn't micron symbolized by a "" ?
    It would be 2ASS then... looks like something someone would say in an AOL chat room...
    please flame me if I'm wrong.

    • Re:Wait... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Mt._Honkey ( 514673 )
      Yeah, Micro is abreviated with mu. However, since mu doesn't exist in the ASCII set, people usualy type 'u'. Then the satalite would actualy be uASS, which I'm sure they wanted to avoid. By the way, has anyone found a link to a picture from the top down? All I see is from the side.
      • By the way, has anyone found a link to a picture from the top down? All I see is from the side.

        As far as I know, there is no polar view of Saturn.

        If you think about it, this makes sense: all the planets orbit around the sun in approximately the same plane (called the plane of the ecliptic), and all the planets (except Uranus) rotate on their axis that are close to perpendicular to this plane. All are tilted to some degree or another - Earth's axis is tilted by more than 23 degrees (which is, of course, why we have distinct seasons).

        Saturn's axis is tilted by more than 26 degrees. This is why in the pictures linked, we appear to be looking at Saturn from slightly below - at other points in Saturn's orbit, we would similarly be looking at it from above, but never more than about 26 degrees.

        Although we could never get an actual single polar image of Saturn, it would be relatively simple to take several images of saturn at various times throught the day (Saturn's day), and interpolate them to create a simulated polar view.

        (as an aside, I am a computing science student. I took a graphics course [ualberta.ca] last semester, and one student did a similar project in image-based rendering. Using the Mona Lisa, he was able to interpolate various positions and create a 3-Dimensional view of it, and he animated it so that it appeared that a camera was going around the face of the person in the image - a very cool effect).

    • It's called 2MASS to rhyme with the sponsoring institution, UMass. Get it?

      Although, since a mu is pronounced identically to an "em", 2ASS would still rhyme with UMASS.

  • ...exciting shots of Saturn

    The first few are free, but if you want more goto Saturn's website and pay $19.95 a month and see all of Saturn.

    Sorry couldn't help myself.
    =)

  • For sale cheap: (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3prong ( 241218 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @09:51PM (#2935319)

    For sale: One novelty T-shirt, displaying the (formerly correct) image of the Milky Way, and the words "You Are Here" with arrow. Lightly used. Almost clean.

  • Moving further out, apparently our Galaxy-cluster as viewed from the outside, looks kind of like a small handful of Swedish meatballs, wrapped in lavendar tissue paper and tied with a length of green and yellow ribbon.

    Or so I'm told....

    • Actually, everybody knows that further out, from just the right angle, it all spells out a "very, very rude word".

      He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in the sky like a child's numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.

      - Wowbagger, from Life, The Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams.

  • Billions and billions... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Teancom ( 13486 ) <david@NoSpaM.gnuconsulting.com> on Thursday January 31, 2002 @09:58PM (#2935347) Homepage
    I jumped on the space bandwagon late, and it's really only been recently that I've developed an interest at all. So I'm in a unique position of learning basic facts that others take for granted, at an age where I can appreciate the grandeur. For instance, the fact that there are truly *billions and billions* of stars *just in our galaxy*. That had me reeling for a couple of days... I don't want to ramble, but *man* is space cool. And space icecream is cool, too, I guess :-)
    • I too had a recent revelation.

      Given the local density of the universe, there should be around 100 star systems within 20 lightyears of the Earth. In fact, we've already identified 76 such star systems. For those that are interested this site [wisc.edu] lists the closest 26 stars (as opposed to star systems, which might be binary, trinary, etc.). There is also a more technical listing [gsu.edu] of the 100 closest known star systems (out to 24 lightyears).

      Expanding away geometrically there would be about 1,700 star systems within 50 lightyears, and 13,000 within 100 lightyears. Fact of the matter is we don't even know which stars most of these are, since the majority of stars are relatively small and small stars rarely have their distance calculated.

      If we ever do figure out how to get up close to light speed, then there is plenty of real estate to explore. Hell, if it turns out that life really is quite common, then maybe little green men actually can afford to come visit us.
      • Interesting thoght. I have another (nope, not a troll!). Suppose warp drive is invented (at least almost light speed and a method of cryo sleep.) How the hell are we gonna exlore these thousands of star systems? We need trillions of people to send out into the heavens. I personally volunteer my genetics to as many as possible...ahem...ladies as possible. Seriously though, we need to get our asses in gear and populate the Sol system (a lá Total Recall). Then we'll have the resources and man power to properly support the M$ monopoly--err explore the galaxy.

    • Re:Billions and billions... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      the fact that there are truly *billions and billions* of stars *just in our galaxy*

      Billions? 10^9? There are 10^25 water molecules in a glass of water. Impressed? Time to jump on the chemistry bandwagon too!
    • I too have recently started reading about space, and one of the nicest sites i've come across is Ask the space scientist [nasa.gov] at NASA. Lots of very interesting questions asked and answered(well) about every aspect of space you can think of.
  • Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".

    • Re:Saturn too perfect (Score:4, Informative)

      by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:42PM (#2935474)
      In actuality it IS a cheap computer rendition. The Saturn image was done in the H and K bands (both in the infrared region) which people can't see. The sensors store an 8-bit sample for each pixel. If you looked at a rasterized image from one of these sensors it would just be an 8-bit greyscale image. These are rather boring to look at so the astonomers apply these grayscale images to colour channels of an RGB image. SO what they are doing is assigning a band you can't normally see (infrared) to bands you can see so you're impressed. This leads to confusion though because the final images don't LOOK anything like they would through a normal telescope. Saturn for example, the rings are super bright and crappy looking. This is because they are formed of ice crystals and dust which relfects infrared radiation pretty well. The original greyscale raster would look just as bright but the ring would be a really light shade pretty close to white in both the H and K bands. Older pictures of Saturn have usually been visual spectrum pictures so they look pretty natural. Cheaper computers have led to many a misleading space photograph.
      • If I recall correctly, aren't the Hubble images all artificaly colored in as well?

        They sure look damn fine. Of course I have never seen nebulas and such up close so the Hubble Image post proccessoring dudes can pretty much do whatever they want to the images and have them look realistic. :)
        • Yeah most every Hubble image you see is a multi-spectrum composite image. Most images are several colour plates combined with infrared and ultra-violet plates combined as a single RGB colour image. The crappy part is all the Hubble images that look so pretty and badass actually don't look that pretty and badass in real life. Hubble gets colour images by putting a filter over the light sensor and holding the apeture open for a long period of time (it is more complex than this really but it is essencially how it works) and then later in a computer that greyscale image is assigned some RGB values and composited into a three colour image. If you were to see a nebula up close and personal (you'd probably not be able to tell you were getting close to one) it would look very grey and bland. You'd also have trouble seeing it because the sheer lack of density. Atoms and molecules in nebulae are really really far apart and in a cubic kilometer of space there might only be a handful of matter. The farther you get your pixel is picking up the radiation from many more cubic kilometers of space giving you a higher average amount of radiation making for better imaging. As you get closer your sensor pixel is seeing less and less cubic kilometers of space and thus gets less radiation making it more difficult to see the large structure you're flying inside of. So Hubble imagry is just ellaborate faking. The stuff you get from space.com is processed more than Kraft singles.


    • > Sorry to say it, but that picture of Saturn is just too perfect, it looks like a cheap computer rendition. Can we go back to the less sophisticated, grainy pictures? They were more exciting and seemed more "real".

      Load it in the gimp and try filters-->noise-->hurl.

      Advanced users may want to try writing a make-planet-photo-grainy.scm script instead.

    • I posted my parent comment semi-seriously; this time let me say it more seriously. When I read this: "It is possibly the sharpest view of Saturn's ring system ever achieved from a ground-based observatory," I was expecting to see all sorts of details, bumps, variations in the rings, basically some texture. But Saturn and its rings look smooth, way too smooth. With the old grainy pictures, I would fill in the details with my imagination. So I guess it's kind of like a movie versus the book its based on; with the book, you just imagine what everything looks like. So yes, it's a sharp picture, but simply not high enough resolution to capture details that I thought it would.
  • is a sign pointing at the Earth stating 'You are here.'
  • Yippie! I always thought they looked cooler than those so-called "s1" galaxies. I'm soo proud to live in such an upscale neighborhood. Eat my dust, S1 riffraff!

  • newest Galactic Center release, in color (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ghostlibrary ( 450718 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:18PM (#2935413) Homepage Journal
    At the AAS meeting a few weeks ago, a Chandra (X-Ray observatory) team produced this stunning mosiac of the Galactic Center [harvard.edu].
    It's amazing. Also, apparently the supposed massive black hole in our galaxy's center is 'off', so there's not a lot of emission from it, instead we see remnants of earlier activity (such as Sagittarius A).
    • Hah! I've heard that one before! "No really, we took a picture of the galactic center but it was off at the time!".

      What? Is it having its lightbulb changed or something?

      Sheesh.

      ;-)

      • Re:newest Galactic Center release, in color (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ghostlibrary ( 450718 ) on Friday February 01, 2002 @01:38AM (#2935964) Homepage Journal
        I know your post was funny (+1) and rhetorical (+1), but I thought I'd answer it anyway because, hey, I'm pedantic (-1).

        Central black holes only are bright if they are sucking in matter. When they suck in matter and generate radiation, the radiation tends to blow away the surrounding gas a bit. Also, just sucking in the matter of course depletes the region.

        So after a bit, the space around the central black hole gets kinda sparse and there's not much for it it eat, so things cool down. This lets the gas further out get dragged in a bit (since there's not as much radiation blowing it away) and eventually enough accumulates that the emission from the black hole increases again.

        A lot of astrophysical stuff has cycles of basically 'eat and blow, thus clearing out the area, then sit there empty until more food gets drawn to you by your superior mass'.

        If you imagine a fat friend with a PS2 who requires chips and soda, you get the picture-- people get sucked in by the cool PS2 games but when the chips are gone and the farting has cleared out the area, he sits there alone until things have time to settle and friends begin to get drawn back to the PS2 again. [Yeah, I know, I'm now a Contendor for Worst Analogy of 2002].
  • Is it just me, or was the picture of the barred galaxy just a little disappointing? Looks just like all the other pictures of spiral galaxies I've seen, except a little less spiral-like. Of course, if I knew what all the parts meant, it might be a little more impressive.

    Unfortunately, once you've seen those mind-staggering pictures of galaxies and stars being born, you get a little jaded.
  • Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, [clunk] And people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft, And you feel that you've had quite enough, [boom]

    [singing] Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

    Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go 'round every two hundred million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe. [boom] [slurp]

    The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

  • When you have ASCII Star Wars? [asciimation.co.nz]
  • It's full of STARS!

  • astronomy and computing... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1.hotmail@com> on Thursday January 31, 2002 @10:54PM (#2935512)
    Take a look at that picture of the center of the galaxy again -- one of the biggest challenges to astronomy is how to catalogue every single object visible and create a rapidly searchable database. And that picture is not even 10% of the sky, in only one band! Astronomers are having to come up with new ways of loading, structuring, and searching multi-TB datasets to get incredible science out of the flood of data. The future of astronomy is in these multi-TB databases, in multiple wavelengths, which create the "National Virtual Observatory".

    If you want to understand the science that these databases would make possible, imagine if your business had a searchable database of the entire population of the world, with parameters like age, height, weight, income, address, phone number, spending habits, and more, for every single person.

    Have a look at this link [us-vo.org] for what some scientists think a virtual observatory will be capable of!

  • Not 'first time' we see center of galaxy. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @11:21PM (#2935582) Journal
    As is so often the case in journalism, this claim is wildly overselling things (and is not made in the BBC article.) I was using IRAS (infrared astronomy satellite) and various earthbound surveys (including the much earlier TMSS two micron all sky survey) around 1990, and have an IRAS poster from that era at home showing our galaxy (including the core.) Similarly, we have known for over a decade that our galaxy is a barred spiral.

    Is this a case of the more overblown your submission, the more likely slashdot is to carry the story?

    I'm not knocking the 2MASS survey - high quality all sky surveys like this lead to huge amounts of high quality science.
    • I should have read more carefully - the BBC article *does* incorrectly claim this as a first: "Evident in the map, and seen directly for the first time, is the cigar-shaped bar..."

      My apologies to the submitter of this story.

      Also, I have checked and found it was COBE (cosmic background explorer) not IRAS that made my poster. Here [nasa.gov] it is. Notice how this too reveals the squarish, thicker towards the edges shape of the bulge indicating a bar seen obliquely.
      • While I don't doubt what you say, the link you provided really doesn't help alot. It isn't easy to deduce that the galaxy is a barred spiral from the image and the write up even claims that the Milky Way is a "typical spiral galaxy", as opposed to the minority case (about 1/3rd) of being a barred spiral. Even now knowing what a barred spiral is, I can really say the image from COBE actually shows this. But the COBE image was derived from the same technique as this (polling infrared light), so I would assume they came to the same conclusion.
    • Sorry for the troll, or whatever a simple question might be called. But I am curious and too lazy to go find out on the web. How is a barred spiral different from a 'normal' one?

  • To Those in the Know (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alpha State ( 89105 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @11:39PM (#2935633) Homepage

    Why isn't there a big blind spot on the opposite side of the calactic center? Can the MASS see through the center, or are they just filling in what they assume is there?

    Furthermore, can we see objects farther away on the opposite side of the galactic center? If not, how big is the blind spot?

    • The image on the BBC site is an edge-on view of our galaxy. The story submission for this is a bit misleading. There are no pictures anywhere on the MASS site which show a "top-down" view which shows us the bars (unless there's one I've missed - anyone?).


    • > Why isn't there a big blind spot on the opposite side of the calactic center? Can the MASS see through the center, or are they just filling in what they assume is there?

      The image is a screenshot, which accidentally had some astronomer dude's wallpaper showing through the gap.

      Too bad it wasn't the wallpaper he uses when journalists aren't around.

  • They got movies too (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Thursday January 31, 2002 @11:46PM (#2935650) Journal
    quick time format, various sizes (5.8mb, 9.5mb, 41mb)

    http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/gallery/gc_movie .html

    it's of the galactic center

    pretty cool

  • Mmmmmm (Score:2, Funny)

    by sweatyboatman ( 457800 )
    I'm sure it's been posted before, but I don't have the patience to look for it.

    MMMMMM Milky Way. That is the first thing that I thought of when I read the article. I could sure go in for a candy bar.

    And (okay now I'm getting deep) that's the problem with getting funding for space probes. My stomach is a lot more important to me than Uranus (or Pluto). Even if it costs next to nothing, I don't want to spend money on a probe when I could be spending money on making my life nicer.

    Knowledge is all well in good, but there's no nugguty center.

    Sweat
  • Nice picture of the galaxy [bbc.co.uk]... but was anyone else disappointed to find that the little red arrow with the words "You are here" was absent?
    • Well considering it's a composite of images taken from the point where the arrow would be pointing (better known as "here") you'd just see a big red arrow pointing out of the picture ;)

      Doug
  • We've known for over ten years that the Milky Way is a barred spiral -- where have you been?
  • we can infer the presence of a bar-like structure in the central regions.

    But would that be Slim's Throat Emporium or the Evildrome Boozerama?
  • I was under the impression that the centre of our galaxy contained a large black hole or similar object. Can't see it on this one [caltech.edu], unless its that big glowy object they've false coloured about 2/3rds of the way down the piccie.

    Anyone care to post a modified picture with a big arrow pointing to it??
    • It's there, but it's small (in an angle-subtended sense - it's roughly 30 microarcseconds in size). No current instruments can resolve the event horizon of the black hole. Of course, many observations of the inner regions of the Galactic Center have been made over the past twenty years, and many spectral features have been associated with emission coming from within a few tens of Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon. Sgr A* (the name for the radio source associated with the black hole and its immediate environment) is actually fairly bright at radio wavelengths, so in that sense we can "see" the region right around the black hole.

      In the next ten years or so, VLBI techniques will probably improve to the point that we can image the Galactic Center and see the shadow of the black hole against the rest of the radiating gas there. Pretty exciting stuff! See this space.com article [space.com] for discussion and images.

      -Gabe
  • But all this proves is the location and distribution of these nearly burnt-out carbon stars. Perhaps the galaxy does indeed look like all of the previous artist's conceptions, but the arrangement of these near-death stars is oddly disproportionate to the rest of the stars, due to some quirk in physics we have not identified yet. I would not change years of extrapolation and calculations due to the location of only one type of star. That would be like basing the shape of the US landmass on the distribution of mountains only.

    It all seems a bit premature to me.

  • Where can I find a higher resolution picture of that external view of the galaxy? I didn't see anything at the 2MASS site. Are they the ones who created that image?
  • While the BBC article was interesting, and the thought of mapping half a billion stars is a bit overwhelming, I am stunned by the pointlessness of the included graphic. It shows the Milky Way from an exterior point on its equatorial plane. Almost all galaxies look alike from this position. What in the world is the author thinking? This is like taking the trouble to visit France, but rather than send home pictures of the Eiffel Tower, one sends home pictures of clouds and rainbows.

Slashdot Top Deals

It was kinda like stuffing the wrong card in a computer, when you're stickin' those artificial stimulants in your arm. -- Dion, noted computer scientist

Close