virgo

"Pinwheel, pinwheel spinning around. Look at my Pinwheel and see what I found. Pinwheel, pinwheel, breezy and bright. Spin me good morning, spin me good night." -Janet Gardner It's time for another Messier Monday, where each week, one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the famed Messier Catalogue -- the first large, accurate catalogue of non-cometary objects -- gets an in-depth treatment. These objects are not only a good representation of the brightest deep-sky objects visible from Earth, they're a good sample of the different types of objects visible from any random location in the…

"It's coming right for us!" -Uncle Jimbo, from South Park Welcome back to another Messier Monday, only here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue, the first accurate and comprehensive deep-sky catalogue of relatively bright, extended celestial objects that can be viewed with even the most primitive of skywatching equipment under good skies. Each one of these objects -- ranging from nebulae to star clusters to galaxies -- holds its own, unique story. Image credit: © 2008 by Patrick Freeman of http://…

"The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it's full of stars!" -Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey Back in October, we began a new, weekly series here called Messier Monday. Each Monday, we've taken a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue, nebulous objects that might potentially be confused with comets by unaware comet-hunters. Image credit: Lee Kelvin and Grant Miller, via http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~lsk9/. These objects include stellar remnants, star-forming nebulae, young star clusters, ancient globular clusters, and distant galaxies far…

Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe. What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this, and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this: Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…

Aaah, the Virgo cluster. A huge cluster of hundreds of galaxies, and our closest large neighbor in the Universe. People have known for a long time that although Virgo is still redshifting away from us, it isn't quite as fast as we would expect from the Hubble expansion rate of the Universe. Does this mean that we're gravitationally bound to it, and some day, we'll move into this dee-luxe apartment in the sky? Nope. Dark energy is here to push it away from us, and we'll unfortunately see this bright neighbor recede farther and farther from us, until it disappears from our sight. So say your…