Posted on 02/03/2011 7:24:52 PM PST by Red Badger
An international team of astronomers led by Mary Williams from the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) has discovered a new stream of stars in our Milky Way: the "Aquarius Stream," named after the constellation of Aquarius. The stream of stars is a remnant of a smaller galaxy in our cosmic neighbourhood, which has been pulled apart by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way about 700 million years ago. The discovery is a result of the measurement of the velocities of 250,000 stars with the RAVE Survey based at the Australian Astronomical Observatory's UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia."I have a stream": with these words the 33-year old scientist from New Zealand enthusiastically presented her discovery to the audience of an international conference. The Aquarius stream was indeed hard to find. Contrary to practically all known streams of stars it is located within the galactic disk. Within the disk, the high concentration of stars of the Milky Way are blocking our way and the stream is indistinguishable from the rest of the stars in its shape. "It was right on our doorstep" Williams says, "but we just couldn't see it." Using RAVE data, the astronomer has now measured the radial velocity of 12,000 stars in that region for the first time. In this way she found that 15 stars show a different velocity pattern than the others, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Ping!......
radial velocity.. sounds racy..
This carnivorous galactic behaviour must somehow be Bush’s fault.
It’s imperialistic. What right does our galaxy have to eat other galaxies? We must pay reparations to the small galaxy for the sins of our galaxy.
Or at least, this must be the result of Sarah Palin’s overly-honest speech.
Maybe it was caused by Galactic Warming......
I just go with the flow......
Everything is circling the drain.
Maybe the smaller galaxy was hiding in some dark matter and attacked the Milky Was galaxy by surprise. The Milky Way galaxy was has the right and duty to defend itself from all intruders.
Too bad you can’t get a “caucus” designation for these kinds of threads where one could read serious discussions of the article at hand.
Thanks for posting it.
At least someone hasnt posted anything about rings around Uranus.....yet....
So it this Bush’s or Palin’s fault?
Call me skeptical, but any large data set will have outliers. And what's with the image anyway? If there's only 15 discovered members in this steam of stars (if it exists at all) why do I see several hundred stars locations depicted?
Amen to that. We need a filter to drop out the jokers and Helen Thomas pics on science and tech threads.
But....it’s getting to be the theme of this whole website.
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That would be nice! One of these types of threads could go for three pages, and 80% of the posts would be annoying bullshit, and it's always the same - Muslims, Global Warming, Bush's Fault, Something to do with Uranus, ect, ect, ect. It's a little funny the first time or two you see something like that, but on EVERY related thread, it gets old.
Cheers!
p.s. graybeard58--I hope we don't become thread-doppelgangers again...
I like the almond ones ... with nougat.
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