Last week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, I had a fabulous opportunity to sit down and talk with Galaxy Zookeepers Jordan Raddick and Chris Lintott. Here is the audio from our conversation - Enjoy!
Star Stryder: An Interview with Zookeepers [Mp3 - 13.8 Mb]
 
NB - there is one more interview to be posted […]

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 […]

Don’t panic, but there’s a giant cloud of hydrogen gas on a collision course with the Milky Way. When it hits, 40 million years from now, it should generate vast regions of star formation. In fact, we don’t even need to wait; the leading edge of this gas cloud is already starting to interact with […]

I just had the strangest realization. Stepping into the Galaxy Evolution session of oral presentations I got to listen to the AstroPixie present her research. Like me, she is a UT person (I got my PhD, she is getting her PhD). I knew that. What I didn’t know is we both have/had one of […]

As galaxies rotate, their spiral arms usually sweep back, trailing behind the rotation of the galaxy. But astronomers have found a galaxy that defies this convention, with its arms opening outward in the same direction as the rotation of the galaxy’s disk.
The galaxy, known as NGC 4622, lies 200 million light years away in the […]

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! […]

We live in a beautiful grand spiral galaxy. But how did we get from the primordial elements after the Big Bang to the intricate and complex structure we live in today? Astronomers have found some of the earliest galactic building blocks; the ancestors of galaxies like our own Milky Way.
The discovery was made by researchers […]

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 […]

 
An Einstein Ring happens when two galaxies are perfectly aligned. The closer galaxy acts as a lens, magnifying and distorting the view of a more distant galaxy. But today astronomers announced that they’ve discovered a double Einstein Ring: three galaxies are perfectly aligned, creating a double ring around the lensing galaxy. The odds of finding […]