Yearly Archives: 2009

astrocast.tv, galaxies, galaxy interactions

Galaxy-building Exercises

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Charting their Growth through  Mergers and Acquisitions

I remember an astronomy class I took back in the early 1990s called “Topics in Stars and Galaxies.”  At that time, HST had just been launched (or was about to be), and so astronomers didn’t have the nice, clean deep images of the early universe that HST and other facilities give us these days.  One of the topics we discussed was the evolution of galaxies, and I remember someone in the class asking “So, how did galaxies get started?”   The professor’s answer was, essentially, “good question.” It wasn’t meant flippantly — it was a good summary of what the future held for folks (like me) who are interested in the formation of galaxies.

The Hickson Compact Group of galaxies (HCG 87); a troupe of interacting galaxies as seen by Hubble Space Telescope.

Today, some twenty years later, we know a lot more about the early universe and the early epochs of galaxy creation, and can track some of the early “seeds” of galaxies back to little shreds of light that we think combined to become larger galaxies.  The hierarchical model of galaxy evolution actually proposes that big galaxies from little galaxies grow (through mergers and interactions). That’s not the entire story, of course, but there is a LOT of interest in the physics and mechanics of those mergers and interactions.

The Milky Way itself was built that way,  and is, in fact, still ingesting some dwarf galaxies today.  Astronomers using a variety of instruments have seen distinct streams of stars that were not born in the Milky Way,  but are finding their homes here as a result of a complex dance between the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies.  In the future, the Milky Way will do a cosmic dance with the Andromeda Galaxy, an act that will change the shape and makeup of these two galactic cities forever.

Want to know more about these mergers and acquisitions? Head on over to Astrocast.tv, where I’ve created a nice segment of The Astronomer’s Universe called “Galaxy Mergers and Acquisitions” that focuses on how galaxies dance together to grow and evolve.

skepticism

Fundamentally Wrong

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Would you Ask Your Banker to Do Your Brain Surgery?

Over at BadAstronomy, Phil Plait is having a field day with Cre@tionist Loonies (CLoonies) I don’t blame him. I am growing increasingly dismayed at the silliness that some people subscribe to in an effort to please the various deities they waste their time trying to supplicate with foolish behavior.

Belief and faith are not matters of science.  And this entry isn’t about having faith — that’s a person’s personal business.  It’s about those some people I noted up there — the CLoonies who have co-opted faith and spirituality to sell the rest of us a bunch of irrational, made-up ideas.

When a CLoonie gets up and tries to school everybody in a part of science that the CLoonie knows just enough about to be dangerous, all he or she is really doing is showing their ignorance. Even those CLoonies who claim they were trained to BE scientists — they are twisting what they learned (at serious taxpayer expense in the case of one CLoonie who claims to have a PhD in astrophysics, but is rejecting everything he learned as a scientist in order to further some strange ideas he came up with) to suit their own private ends. So, the next time you run into somebody claiming that their god/goddess/object of faith has all the answers for science questions, run away very fast. The odds are very high (more like 100 to 1) that this person is full of it.

Think of it this way — a CLoonie without scientific training, professing to explain science to you — is asking you to accept a bill of goods. Is actually lying to you in order to get something. What would that something be?  Probably money.  Maybe just a feeling of power.  Of looking more important and better than you.

But, if you start to pick apart such a person’s claims and beliefs and assertions, you just about always find out they don’t know what they’re talking about. That they are fundamentally wrong. And, I bet you they know it, but they’re hooked on the feelings of power they get from their act.

For questions of science, research, and just plain how the universe works, it’s best to rely on somebody who actually DOES the science and doesn’t have a spiritual axe to grind. No good scientist is going to ask you take anything on “belief.”  He or she is going to show you the facts. Not made-up facts. Not tainted facts. Just facts based on reliable observational methods.

Hey, if you need a surgeon, do you ask your banker who had the same surgery to do the procedure for you, since he knows about it?  Would you ask an airline pilot to remove a tooth for you, since she once had one removed and knows how it feels?  How about getting your car fixed by an actor, since he played a car mechanic on TV once?  No?  Then why let self-anointed CLoonies tell you how the universe works based on their faulty, faith-based delusions of self-educated grandeur?  Real scientists can tell you all the exciting and provocative stories you want to hear about the universe, and those will be stories based on real science.

You’re better and smarter than the CLoonies think you are, you know.  They’re looking for dupes. For people gullible enough to buy the crap they’re selling. And, mark my words, they ARE trying to sell something.

But, you have common sense on your side. And intelligence. If you believe in a deity — use what you think your deity gave you to honestly ask questions about the cosmos — and don’t fall for foolish claims of “teach the controversy” or “God made all this” or whatever 7 impossible things a CLoonie tries to tell you you SHOULD believe in.  Science is not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of facts and knowledge based on observable phenomena.  Period.  All other attempts to explain it through hocus-pocus and oogedy-boogedy magic is, as Sherman T. Potter says, “Mule muffins.”