theastrophysicist

Spiral Galaxy Animation

Did you know that stars routinely enter and leave the spiral arms of the galaxy? In fact, the motion of the stars might even be in the opposite direction from what one might guess by the shape of the spiral!

The spiral arms are just regions where greater densities of stars are found. In turn, when gas enters the spiral arms, they get compressed, allowing newer, brighter, younger stars to form (presumably shown with the red blips in the animation).

I have a minor complaint though… If I were the author of the animation, I would flip the colour scheme so that brighter younger stars show up bluer.

Reminds me of traffic density waves…

Spent a good portion of this week trying to install PYRAF on my 64 bit windows 7 laptop. Of course, my laptop is set to dual boot into Ubuntu, but seeing as to how I rarely restart and boot into Ubuntu, I decided that its finally time to try out a virtual machine. I’ve finally succeeded, and here’s some documentation on the path I took.

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Cassiopeia A, as seen by Chandra. False Colour Image produced by SAOImage DS9. Data from the Chandra Data Archive (Observation ID 198).

(via tumples)

Taken at Fuertes Observatory with a point and shoot (15 second exposure). Notice the streak on the bottom of the picture… I actually thought that I had gotten a satellite when I first saw the photograph on my computer, which got me really excited for a while. Some thought convinced me that it most likely is a plane, and we can get a rather good measure of the frequency of the blips from its lights by a simple calculation which I leave as an exercise for the reader.