Edward Hopper. Seven A.M. 1948. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Shop at the end of the street...

At the school of cunning...

HOW MANY GALAXIES ORBIT THE MILKY WAY??

Blog#454

Saturday, November 16th, 2024.

Welcome back,

In space, the gravitational pull of massive objects is irresistible to smaller ones. Moons are locked in orbit around planets. Planets, asteroids and comets orbit more massive stars, and stars collect around supermassive black holes, forming galaxies.

Large galaxies, like the Milky Way, attract smaller galaxies. Our solar system's cosmic neighborhood spans 100,000 light-years and contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. The Milky Way is so big that, over billions of years, its mass has captured numerous dwarf galaxies, which contain no more than a few billion stars, as satellites.

But how many satellite galaxies does the Milky Way have?

The count is continually changing as new telescopes and sky surveys reveal ever-fainter galaxies. But let's start with the ones we can see easily. Two of Milky Way's prominent satellite galaxies are the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud. They orbit the Milky Way at a distance of about 160,000 light-years and are visible from the Southern Hemisphere without a telescope, according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

However, such highly visible satellites are the exception, not the rule. Most satellite galaxies are so small and dim that they are invisible to all but the most powerful telescopes. Scientists find dwarf galaxies by using instruments with a wide field of view to capture as much of the sky as possible, said Or Graur, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K.

"The bigger telescopes get and the better our instruments get, we can drill down to fainter and fainter dwarf galaxies, down to what is now called ultra-faint dwarfs," which have just a few hundred thousand stars, Graur told Live Science.

Confirming if a nearby dwarf galaxy is a Milky Way satellite involves spectroscopy — analysis of the light it emits — to determine its motion and direction, said Marla Geha, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University.

Originally published on https://www.livescience.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, November 20th, 2024)

"IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE??"

Unmute the loop!

Joan Osborne - One Of Us

CRISPY PARMESAN AIR FRYER BRUSSELS SPROUTS

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

*u*

Marian Ellis Rowan (1848-1922, Australian) ~ One hundred and fifty-eight medium- and small-sized moths, in seven columns. A wide range of families is represented, including the NOCTUIDAE, ARCTIIDAE, LASIOCAMPIDAE, LYMANTRIIDAE, GEOMETRIDAE, PYRALIDAE, SESIIDAE, etc. 

Watercolour with bodycolour on green paper

[Source: Christie’s]

Best guess is a Custom, not a Studio.

ルリビタキ（Red-flanked bluetail）