Fraser, Pamela and I have been whining remarking to each other that there is a huge amount of news coming from this meeting, and we’re having a heckuva time keeping up. Some is worth a long writeup, while others can probably be handled with a short post. Below are a few of the stories that […]

A few months back, I blogged about GalaxyZoo, a very cool project that lets anyone classify galaxies from a professional astronomical survey of the sky. They got thousands of people helping, and have classified a million galaxies.
Wow.
But they had a problem: people were finding significantly more counterclockwise-rotating spiral galaxies than clockwise. That’s a problem! […]

Space is a dangerous place. Stars explode, black holes gobble up matter… but some violent events are so huge they affect entire galaxies, mayhem on a scale so vast it numbs the mind.
Galaxies are island universes, cities of billions or even hundreds of billions of stars. Some galaxies, like our Milky Way, live pretty much […]

The picture above shows a cosmic bulls-eye of epic alignment. But before I can tell you about it, I have to tell you about how the dart got thrown.
One of the more amazing aspects of looking into deep, deep space is that the path there is tortured and twisted. Space itself can be distorted by […]

Enough of this small stuff, let’s look at the big picture. The really really big picture. In this case, one of the largest patches of the sky ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. A new detailed survey was released today that combines 80 separate Hubble images together. In addition to a framework of galaxy […]

Look out in the sky today, and you’ll see only a few kinds of galaxies. Most are elliptical, fuzzy round blobs containing billions of stars. Others are spirals, of course, flattened disks with magnificent spiral arms. Others are irregular in shape, and the fourth kind are peculiar; they have a definite shape (rings, for example) […]