The Antennae Galaxies

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STScI-PRC2006-46 ::: ENLARGE Image ::: Hubblesite ZOOM

The Antennae Galaxies/NGC 4038-4039
This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of this collision billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.

The two galaxies started to interact several hundred million years ago, making the Antenae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of the image centre are the cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing pink in the image.

The new image allows astronomers to better distinguish between the stars and super star clusters created in the collision of two spiral galaxies. By age dating the clusters in the image, astronomers find that only about 10 percent of the newly formed super star clusters in the Antennae will survive beyond the first 10 million years. The vast majority of the super star clusters formed during this interaction will disperse, with the individual stars becoming part of the smooth background of the galaxy. It is however believed that about a hundred of the most massive clusters will survive to form regular globular clusters, similar to the globular clusters found in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms" extending far out from the nuclei of the two galaxies, best seen by ground-based telescopes. These "tidal tails" were formed during the initial encounter of the galaxies some 200 to 300 million years ago. They give us a preview of what may happen when our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in several billion years.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and
the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
Acknowledgment: B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute)

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The Big Bang dialogues
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1) A Gravitational collapse of what?
2) Does gravity precede the Big Bang
3) Do we now favour Smolin's: "this Universe came into being thru a pin prick or small blackhole in another universe?"
4) A Big Bang theory with no collision? then how can the collider presume to take us back to the Big Bang
5) Ok - so no collision, but what is it exploded that contained the seed for all the matter we see in the universe ...
6) This logic or thinking would favour Smolin's theory that we are indeed a blackhole within (or from) another blackhole, like a seed contains the DNA to turn it into a tree -in the right environment- and sperm contains the DNA to turn it into another different human -in the right nucleus or egg-
Incidentally if you can have dolly the cloned sheep you can have replica (cloned) blackholes - but what happened to dolly the sheep? didn't last as long

If we detect radiation from North Korea, Pakistan and India - we have proof of nuclear tests or nuclear explosions. But if we didn't have old film or footage (recorded images) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki how could we presume to know what was there before 1945. Would we then trace the radiation back to the atomic explosions and conclude a big bang took place - and Japan appeared out of nowhere???
Is Ground zero anything other than a 'blackhole' in spacetime.

The string saga of star shine by Plato
Dark Matter & Chocolate by Sabine @ BackReaction
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Famous Quotes Millions saw the apple fall,
but Newton was the one who asked why. Bernard Baruch
Newton tried to understand & explain why apples fall. Quasar9
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