Thursday, January 8, 2009

Astronomy

First, I want to thank Bob from Black holes and Astrostuff for alerting me to the fact that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Check out the link to find out all about astronomical stuff going on all over the world this year. Also, visit Bob. He has some Hannah Montana 3-D glasses to give away if you happen to live in Ontario and stop by for his Year of Astronomy event.

Now, I heard the alarming news today that our galaxy might have only two arms. That got me thinking about how I know what the galaxy looks like and that led me to discover (Please forgive me here. I'm just a sign maker with a biology degree.) that all those pictures of the galaxy that I've seen are paintings. I mean, how are they going to take a photograph from outside the galaxy? They aren't. So how did the artists know what to paint? Astronomers told them.

Not only might the galaxy have only two arms, it's probably also a lot bigger and moving a lot faster than we thought. Here's the press release about the talk that astronomer Mark Reid gave at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Links:

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

All About Mark Reid

The abstract for an article about cosmic masers

Word Of The Day
(in this case, phrase)

Cosmic Maser: I had a hard time with this one. I started with the word Maser, which turns out to stand for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. What that means is that it's a microwave version of a laser, which, as far as I can tell, means that when you shoot microwaves at some molecules (gas molecules in this case) you make more microwaves. Cosmic, means that it happens out in the cosmos. The findings of the study I mention above were made using a radio telescope.
Posted by Marilyn at 1:00 AM
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3 comments:

  1. I love astronomy. Even though I'm not pursuing a career in this field, I'm still fascinated by it. There's so much to explore and it looks beautiful.

    http://dratiffarid.today.com
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  2. I like astronomy too.
    There's a neat site which has the "Astronomy Picture Of The Day".
    You probably already know all about it. :)

    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
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  3. Thanks for the mention Marilyn. We still really don't know for sure how many arms there are.

    Since we are right in the middle of things we are not looking at our galaxy from a proper perspective, we can't see the forest for the trees so to speak. Plus the fact that we have so much cosmic dust in the way it is really hard to tell for sure the amount of arms we have.

    With the use of new technology, like in the book I described in my post we are seeing more clearly, I remember reading the link you cited,excellent link BTW, I love the phrase.
    "Here there be dragons",lol.

    Masers have really a simple job that is to provide an extremely accurate frequency that we can among other things base time on for example.

    Awesome post!!
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