Being that today was Valentine's Day... and I spent most of it chasing around my three kids at their various school activities... and I hardly saw my hubby at all... and I DO have this blog assignment... I got to thinking, "What does Astronomy and Valentine's Day have in common, if anything?"
Okay.... I know it's corny.. but I was just curious....
As usual, the internet does not disappoint. You can find anything out there in cyberspace, if you just have the right keywords!
A Google search for "valentine and star" resulted in a website (www.souledout.org/nightsky/valentinestar/valentinestar.html) about Betelguese, the large star marking the shoulder in Orion.
The site mingles a bit of science with a bit of fancy.
There are links and references to help you navigate thru the night sky using Orion and Betelguese as a reference for finding other constellations. I also found a link for the word history of the star which shows how easily a simple character translation mistake shaped it's early Arabic name from "the hand of ...." to the Latin form of "armpit" before finally ending up as Betelguese in English by way of French.
Knowing so very little about the night sky, I was intrigued to discover that the star actually "beats" once every six years, cycling from dimmest to brightest in that time. At it's largest, the star is reported at being over 900 times the width of our Sun.. a number I find staggering! (At the smallest, the star is merely 500 times the width of the Sun. Gracious!)
But, the site also plays on the more "romantic" side of the holiday with references to stimulating the heart center and aiding the spiritually attuned. LOL! It even calls Betelguese a "Cosmic Valentine" (Hmm... guess I'm just a skeptic.)
I did like the photo of what reminds me of the galaxy mergers from the GalazyZoo project. It shows a heart shaped body of gas/star(s)/dust with two extended arms. The site calls the photo "Cosmic Embrace" and references it from an observatory in Antilhue, Chile. But who's to say the photo hasn't been "enhanced" with photoshop or some other software? I would have to research the photo elsewhere before I believed anything and I'm not sure how to go about doing that.
Anyway... I found the site interesting... and worth a chuckle.
Happy Valentine's, everyone!
P.
Thanks for that! You've raised a few interesting points. The name Betelgeuse has an interesting history!
ReplyDeleteThe six-year pulsations are actually common to most giant stars, and are of vital importance to measuring how far away distant stars and galaxies are, as we will learn next week!
You're right to be skeptical of the image of the "cosmic embrace", but remarkably the image is actually undoctored. The two colliding galaxies are the antennae galaxies (or NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 to their friends). You can see them in more detail on the wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antennae_Galaxies
So, how did you find the actual names/references for the colliding galaxies? There must be millions of photos out there and how do researchers catalogue them in a way that others can then use?
ReplyDeleteBasically, I'm asking HOW? How did you find the names NGC 4038 and NGC 4039?
If i just had the picture to go on, it would indeed be rather a difficult piece of research - but I went to the souledout site you referenced and found a link under the photo to the website of the observatory that took it, which usefully has a gallery of galaxy images and the names of said galaxies!
ReplyDelete(http://www.verschatse.cl/galaxies.htm)