Celestia Forums

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-070



Just.... wow! That is an incredible image!

Isn't it, though? Even in pure visible light, the galaxy is beautiful. It makes you wonder what an inhabitant of that galaxy would see when they look up at night. Anything different from what we see? Perhaps a more tightly confined backbone of night?

...John...

I should add that this image is actually a merged visible light and IR image. In case you were wondering .

Who Hoovered?„? the core?

see also my respective thread here:

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7229&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=14

Bye Fridger

MKruer wrote:Who Hoovered?„? the core?

That's what an IR telescope is designed to do. At that wavelength, the dust disappears.

I imagine it is a false-color image. Any image taken in the non-visible spectrum has to be assigned colors so we visual-band creatures can see it.

There's still that fuzzy glow above and below around the disk in the pure IR image though (see Fridger's link, bottom right corner). Is that really there (ie some kind of glowing gas or dust?) or is that an imaging artifact?

Further to Dollan's question: if it's really there, would someone in the disk of that galaxy see a glow on either side of his 'milky way'?

Oh Evil One,
The fuzzy spherical glow that extends above and below the ring consists of the billions of stars that are in the main ellipsoidal body of the galaxy.

All stars glow in the infrared, just some glow more brightly than others.

As a result, yes, someone living on a planet orbiting a star near the dust ring will see light all over the sky. Most of it will be concentrated in the half of the sky that contains M104's center. There'll be lots of individual bright stars, of course.

selden wrote:Oh Evil One,
The fuzzy spherical glow that extends above and below the ring consists of the billions of stars that are in the main ellipsoidal body of the galaxy.

All stars glow in the infrared, just some glow more brightly than others.

As a result, yes, someone living on a planet orbiting a star near the dust ring will see light all over the sky. Most of it will be concentrated in the half of the sky that contains M104's center. There'll be lots of individual bright stars, of course.

D'accord, monsieur...

Bye Fridger

selden wrote:Oh Evil One,
The fuzzy spherical glow that extends above and below the ring consists of the billions of stars that are in the main ellipsoidal body of the galaxy.

All stars glow in the infrared, just some glow more brightly than others.

As a result, yes, someone living on a planet orbiting a star near the dust ring will see light all over the sky. Most of it will be concentrated in the half of the sky that contains M104's center. There'll be lots of individual bright stars, of course.

Oh. Here's me thinking this was a spiral galaxy (guess the dust disk gave me that impression)... but from the sound of it, it's really an ellipsoid galaxy with a disk? That's quite nifty.

My understanding is that current theories are that the giant elliptical galaxies, especially those in the centers of galaxy clusters, are formed from the collisions of many smaller galaxies. In this case, we're supposedly seeing the results of a recent collision. One of the progenitor galaxies most likely was a spiral.