Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Single Spiral Galaxy?


I like looking at beautiful astronomical photos, but I seldom post them because after wow, and that's beautiful, there isn't much to say.

This picturehas all of that and more, but it is the questions that it generatest that I think makes it note worthy.

Before I saw this photo in the Daily Galaxy blog I would have staunchly insisted that this type of galaxy was not possible. Seeing this odd single spiral galaxy you would think that some natural law but there it stubbornly sits.

According to the article:
  • (this is) galaxy NGC 4725 --a barred spiral galaxy about 40 million light-years away in the constellation Corna Berenices.
  • (this photo was taken) August 25, 2003 (by the) NASA Spitzer Space Telescope
Daily Galaxy article

2 comments:

JoshM said...

As a general rule, I've always assumed "impossible" just means "something we haven't quite figured out yet".

Beam Me Up said...

Josh
Yeah, kinda go in that direction... I was half asleep when I came across this photo. By impossible I had in mind the first law of motion. So if you fling an arm out in one direction, and hope to maintain equilibrium )then there has to be another arm at 180ยบ (hence the Milky Way. and I know, our galaxy is vastly more complex than was once thought. We may have six or more spiral arms) At the age I would suspect the galaxy is, I would have thought that the arm would have wound up again, but there it is ...