Page 5 - Halton Arp News Today

At first glance, a galaxy known as NGC 2276 looks like a typical face-on spiral, albeit a bit lopsided. But as this spectacular photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows, the gravity of a nearby galaxy is tugging on the right side of the spiral, pulling one arm away, while interactions with hot inter-galactic gas fuel rampant starburst on the left side as indicated by the bluish-pink regions. One of those regions is believed to be home for a 50,000-solar-mass black hole. NGC 2276’s appearan...

Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason?

  The beauty and wonders of our planet’s night sky cloaks a violent, ever-changing universe of life, death, and mayhem –“with firestorms of star birth, dying stars rattling the very fabric of space in titanic explosions,” observes Hubble scientists.  “Death-star-like beams of energy blasting out of overfed black holes at nearly the speed of light”, they say, “Hubble has seen them all.” A universe of which the Milky Way is one of 150 billion galaxies. A strange universe, hinted...