File:A Galactic Traffic Jam - potw2009a.tif
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Summary
[edit]DescriptionA Galactic Traffic Jam - potw2009a.tif |
English: The barred spiral galaxy NGC 3887, seen here as viewed by the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, lies over 60 million light-years away from us in the southern constellation of Crater (The Cup); it was discovered on 31 December 1785 by the German/British astronomer William Herschel.
Its orientation to us, while not exactly face-on, allows us to see NGC 3887’s spiral arms and central bulge in detail, making it an ideal target for studying a spiral galaxy’s winding arms and the stars within them. The very existence of spiral arms was for a long time a problem for astronomers. The arms emanate from a spinning core and should therefore become wound up ever more tightly, causing them to eventually disappear after a (cosmologically) short amount of time. It was only in the 1960s that astronomers came up with the solution to this winding problem; rather than behaving like rigid structures, spiral arms are in fact areas of greater density in a galaxy’s disc, with dynamics similar to those of a traffic jam. The density of cars moving through a traffic jam increases at the centre of the jam, where they move more slowly. Spiral arms function in a similar way; as gas and dust move through the density waves they become compressed and linger, before moving out of them again. |
Date | |
Source | https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw2009a/ |
Author | ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Erwin et al. |
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Width | 973 px |
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Height | 1,009 px |
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Compression scheme | LZW |
Pixel composition | RGB |
Orientation | Normal |
Number of components | 3 |
Number of rows per strip | 89 |
Horizontal resolution | 72 dpi |
Vertical resolution | 72 dpi |
Data arrangement | chunky format |
Software used | Adobe Photoshop CC (Windows) |
File change date and time | 15:43, 19 September 2019 |
Color space | Uncalibrated |