Astronomy |
Unusual Galactic Structures - A Photo Essay
The universe is home to some really strange things. It is always surprising to find something that looks familiar out there. One thing that we have to remember is that any structure that we see will be huge. As a matter of fact they give the word huge a whole new meaning, since these things can be many light years across. Is it just a coincidence that there are things out there that look like objects that we can readily recognize? I think you have to do some calculations of the odds here. For example, how complicated a structure do we see out there? I think almost everyone is familiar with the structure of human DNA, it appears as a Double Helix. What are the chances that we would ever find gases and stars making up an image of this? They have to be greater than winning the lottery and yet there it is, a double helix appearing out there. When scientists and astronomers first saw it, they couldn't believe their eyes. Below is a photo of it.
Double Helix Sometimes there are structures that appear on other planets and moons in our own solar system, in our own backyard so to speak. One of the most incredible to date is a cloud formation that is found above the north pole of the ringed planet Saturn. Who would have even thought that clouds could form into an almost perfect hexagon, yet there it is.
Hexagon On Saturn Structures can be found in space that are not big at all. In a recent case, NASA found that there was a red glow coming from the Milky Way, but it was not visible from the Earth. They determined that it was coming from extremely fine dust clusters that cause this glow by combining molecular forces that oppose each other. Below is a rendition of this newly discovered molecular cluster.
New Molecular Structure Found In Space Sometimes there are structures in space that appear familiar to us, because they look like animals of some kind. I guess one of the most famous is the Horsehead Nebula. This has been one of the most favorite sights for amateur astronomers.
Horsehead Nebula
What would you think of a giant eye watching you from space? There is something called the Helix Nebula that resembles such an eye.
Helix Nebula Sometimes there are objects in space that are interesting because of their form, not because the look like anything in particular. I think one of my favorites is Messier object 82. Charles Messier selected these objects that could be seen with a small telescope in the late 1700s. His list of objects reached 110. He was actually a comet hunter and these objects sometimes looked like a comet so he wrote them down so as not to get them confused with real comets.
M82 - Notice The Gas Jets Coming Out Of Each Side Another interesting formation is the Crab Nebula. There is just something about this nebula that has held the interest of people for hundreds of years.
Crab Nebula Getting back to objects that look like other things, one of the most famous is the Eagle Nebula. Below is a beautiful NASA photo of the nebula.
Eagle Nebula The Butterfly Nebula is one of the stranger ones. I personally don't think that it looks like a butterfly, I think that it looks more like two ampules joined together.
Butterfly Nebula Nebula V838 Monocerotis has always struck me as a real peculiar type of structure, look at it below and see what you think of it. I kept thinking that this looked familiar, then it dawned on me, it looks somewhat like the Firefox icon.
V838 Monocerotis A recent image from the European Space Agency is captioned as looking like a bird. I think it looks more like a delicate dragonfly. See what you think.
Bird Well I guess you can see by now that there really are a lot of strange looking things out there. Most of them remind me of looking at clouds and seeing different shapes in them, of course this can not account for things like the Hexagon on Saturn. Some say that this doesn't account for the double helix either. I will leave that up to you to decide. All I know is that space is a strange place and it is beginning to seem that we can find almost any shape that is familiar to us out there. |
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