BAN #310: Live interviews, SciFi Mashups, Spiral galaxy NGC 5866

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about

A reminder that today at noon Pacific time I’ll be on the podcast “Into the Impossible” with astronomer Brian Keating. We’ll be talking, um, astronomy. Actually it’s a free-form interview so I don’t know exactly what we’ll cover. Should be fun. Here’s the YouTube video for ease of watchment:

Also, on Friday at 11:00 p.m. Eastern I’ll be on Bad Movies Live with comedian Greg Benson, and we’ll be live watching “Crack in the World”, one of my favorite over-the-top scifi flicks. That will be very silly fun.

Random Thoughts

Stuff I think about in the shower, typically

Sometimes out of the blue I’ll get an idea for what I think is a funny tweet or series of tweets, and then never do anything about it past taking notes. I have a text file I dump them into and promptly forget about them. But I was recently tidying up my Mac desktop (ah, procrastination, what we would not do without it?) and saw the file. I haven’t peeked in there for a while, so I took a look.

Most of the ideas are outdated, based on stuff that happened too long ago to make sense to post now. But they still made me laugh, and I hate wasting ideas!

So. Remember when, for a while, SciFi (when it was still SciFi) made a bunch of movies where they mashed up two different monsters, like “Mansquito”, or “Piranhaconda”? Yes, these are real movies.

I made a list of movie ideas I could pitch. So here are tweets I never tweeted under the hashtag #SciFiComingSoon:

ZOMGbies

Spelling Beast (or maybe Aaron Spelling’s Bees)

Mummiesschanz

Velocirapture

Franken’s Stein (mostly just Al Franken drinking beer out of a German mug)

Wash and Wearwolves

Maybe not my best work but I think Velocirapture has possibilities (though after I thought of it I found others had as well, though for other reasons). I think Marvel would really go for Gnat Romanoff, too (“See, she doesn’t have superpowers in the movies, but in an alternate reality she’s bitten by a radioactive gnat, and…”). I myself would buy tickets to see Mummiesschanz live. Especially when they unroll their bandages.

And hey, if you don’t remember these movies or just don’t believe me, well then, I will make you believe:

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

I have another photo from my friend and astronomer Adam Block, whose name you may recognize from the many, many photos of his I have posted over time, including a couple that I’ve used as banners for this very newsletter.

But what are you gonna do, complain that I post too many gorgeous galaxy photos? Seriously?

No. You will not because it is literally impossible to post too many gorgeous galaxy photos. To wit:

[NGC 5866, an edge-on disk galaxy. Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona]

Boom! That is NGC 5866, a disk galaxy seen almost precisely edge-on (click that link to see it in much higher resolution, and you want to). Galaxies come in four major flavors: Elliptical, disk, irregular (kinda sorta shapeless), and peculiar (these have a definite shape but are weird, like ring galaxies).

Our Milky Way is a disk galaxy, specifically a spiral galaxy. Not all disk galaxies have spiral arms, though. Some are just, well, disks, relatively featureless cosmic dinner plates lacking spiral arms. They’re usually found in in dense galaxy clusters; as they move through the gas in between galaxies their own gas gets dragged out (for the same reason you open a window after your dog (or otherwise) toots in the car). This stifles star formation, and birthing stars is a big reason why galaxies have spiral arms.

These galaxies are also called lenticulars (due to being lens-shaped when seen edge-on), or sometimes S0 galaxies, from a classification scheme astronomers use to ID galaxies by their spiral arm shapes.

NGC 5866 is classified as a disk galaxy, but I wonder. That dust lane slicing it in half is extremely unusual for a lenticular. If it’s actually a relatively normal spiral than you’d expect a dust lane like that.

On the other hand, look at all that weird wonky structure!  It looks like several bands of countless stars, all at different angles and heights above the disk. That’s a telltale sign that NGC 5866 has undergone at least one relatively big collision with another galaxy. This seriously messes up the patterns of galaxies due to the immense gravity of the two objects involved. They twist and distort each other during the collision. If the galaxies merge the resulting bigger galaxy settles down but that can take a billion years, so maybe NGC 5866 is finally nearing the end of an eons-long event. That’s the way I’d bet. Then that dust lane makes sense too; if one of the two galaxies has a lot of dust then this is the result you’d expect.

As it happens NGC 5866 is part of a small group of galaxies, so again that lends credence to this idea.

It creeps me out a little how elegantly violent galactic collisions are, and how majestic the results can be. On the other hand, big galaxies grow this way, and we live in one of the bigger galaxies in the Universe, so we may literally owe our own existence to events like these.

Et alia

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