Sunday, April 19, 2009

Just How Small You Are: Part 2

In my previous post I displayed a photo from NASA that showed a number of galaxies. I mentioned that there were hundreds, or even thousands of galaxies in the photo. To further illustrate my point I will point out a few of the galaxies that I noticed. I will include the full photo at the bottom of this post and I have marked it with three letters. The letters refer to galaxies that I wanted to point out. All the letters are immediately to the left of the region that I have blown up to show the galaxies. Here are three examples of galaxies that I could see in the photo:

Galaxy B (Located in the bottom right quadrant of the photo):There are two obvious galaxies in this region. They may or may not be interacting, but more likely they just happen to line up in our line of sight. How many more galaxies can you see in this small region? I count ~20, with two possible foreground stars, (plus one possible supernova, and at least one AGN).

If you looked at the full photo you probably saw Galaxy B since it is rather large compared to others. Galaxy C you may not have noticed at first, but it is easily seen when pointed out. It is in the center of the photo just above the middle (about where the purple fades out).
Now for the last galaxy I wanted to point out. Galaxy A:
Galaxy A is located in the top left corner of the photo. You will have to click on the full photo below (and maybe even download it, and zoom in) in order to see what I am talking about. Yes that little tiny smudge is a galaxy. Now that I have pointed out things in the photo that are galaxies, take a look at the full photo and realize that every smudge, every minor blemish in the background is a galaxy, in addition to all the larger objects that obviously are galaxies. When I say there are a lot of galaxies out there, that is what I am talking about, and that is just how small you are.

1 comment:

James Tanner said...

Yes, I am convinced that I am shrinky.