I Can’t Get Enough of Them!

Those Colliding Galaxies

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I know, I know. I showed you one of these a few entries ago. But, I can’t help it. I’m stuck on ’em. Just look at this picture and tell me you aren’t taken with the beauty of two galaxies colliding. And look at all the galaxies in the background!  They’re in all shapes and sizes.

In case you didn’t figure this out already, it’s another gorgeous view from Hubble Space Telescope. It’s of NGC 3256, an object that looks like one galaxy but is actually the aftermath of a collision of two spearate galaxies. There’s a double nucleus here and the two “footlike” smears extending out from either side of the central action are tidal tails chock-full of hot young stars and gas clouds.

You May NOT Be Able to Go to Space

But Your Name Can!

The fine folks at NASA’s Kepler mission are working on a spacecraft that will go into space to survey the Milky Way to look for stars that might have life-bearing worlds orbiting them. Now, the spacecraft isn’t GOING to those planets; it’s just going up to near-Earth space to get out from under our blurry atmosphere. Out in space, the seeing will be much better, and theoretically anyway, the instruments will be able to see things in finer detail (like a planet) around all those stars it will survey.

Now, while it might be a lot of fun to actually go to all those planets, the realities of space travel (notably the time it takes to go from one star to another) make it impossible to do that. But, you can, if you wish, send your name to space aboard the spacecraft. All you have to do is fill out a form at the Kepler website and send it along to the team. It’s as easy as that. Since I don’t have an asteroid named after me yet, I’m going to send my name to space aboard Kepler. Why don’t you try it, too?