12 February 2009

A Cosmic Point One Zero and Birthday Wishes to Darwin

Posted by Dan Satterfield

The Hubble telescope is back, up and running, To celebrate, NASA released a cool picture.

The galaxies here are 400 million light years away. They look like the number .10 no??

So what happened is thought to be this. The galaxy on the left passed through the blue ringed galaxy on the right. This caused the ring to develop and knocked the center of the blue galaxy off to the left. The core of the destroyed blue galaxy is the bright red decimal point.

Now why didn’t I think of that!
cosmic-decimal

The other news today is that today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. Founder of modern biology, whose discovery of our origins has revolutionized the world. The BBC has transmitted  several excellent programs on Darwin in the past few weeks. One of the best, is from Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4.

Great exhibit on Darwin at the British Museum of Natural Science on London. I had a chance to visit last October. The photo is mine. Darwin, not the galaxies. That was from Hubble 😉

img_9790img_9791

Later,

Dan