Fireworks

Remember, remember the fifth of November. In the UK it is Guy Fawkes night or bonfire night as most people call it these days. All over the country people have been building bonfires and letting off fireworks to celebrate the fact that Guy Fawkes didn't blow up Parliament or the King back in 1605. Nowadays it is an excuse to let off some fireworks and wave some sparklers around.

To keep in with the firework theme, here is a Hubble Space Telescope image of Hoag's Object, in the constellation of Serpens. Although it resembles a Catherine Wheel, it is actually a ring galaxy that is about 120,000 light years across and that makes it similar in size to the Milky Way. The outer ring consists of newly formed massive blue stars whereas the centre contains lot of older redder stars. How exactly it formed, nobody is sure, and that makes it really curious. Even more curiously, there just happens to be another remarkably similar ring-galaxy visible in the distance between the two rings.

Hoags Object
Hoag's Object CREDIT: Tiffany Borders and The Hubble Heritage Team

Tags:
Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Saturday 05th Nov 2005 (23:59 UTC) | 7 Comments | Permalink

Comments: Fireworks

Just so's you know, a young undergrad by the name of Tiffany Borders put that image together for the HST Heritage team. She was an undergrad at Sonoma State University and worked with my group, and did a summer internship at Hubble where she worked on that image. She's now at Socorro, working with the VLA.

Posted by Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer on Sunday 06th Nov 2005 (05:10 UTC)

Thanks Phil. I've updated the image credit tag. It is funny because another Hubble Heritage image caught my eye when I was looking for Hoag's Object and it was also put together by Tiffany.

Posted by Stuart on Sunday 06th Nov 2005 (09:14 UTC)

Let me know when John Inman day falls this year so I can make my travel arrangements!!! ;-)

Posted by Rob on Sunday 06th Nov 2005 (22:34 UTC)

John Inman day?!? After the actor from Are you being served?

Posted by Stuart on Monday 07th Nov 2005 (10:18 UTC)

Did you see any bright Taurid fireballs? I didn't, but Mars was pretty good.

Posted by Ian Musgrave on Monday 07th Nov 2005 (11:51 UTC)

I AM FREEEEEEEEEEE.....

Posted by Rob on Monday 07th Nov 2005 (12:21 UTC)

Ian, I did see some Taurids, but nothing as bright as seems to have been seen elsewhere.

Posted by Stuart on Monday 07th Nov 2005 (16:11 UTC)

ADD A COMMENT:


Don't provide an email/URL unless really necessary as your comment may get caught in the spam filter. No URLs get turned into links so don't bother. The ground rules for commenting are:
  1. No profanity or personal attacks please. Keep it clean.
  2. Restrict comments to subjects relevant to the post.
  3. Don't mention Pluto. If you do it'll be replaced by Goofy.
  4. No spam i.e. anything commercial unrelated to astronomy.
  5. If you think you've discovered a Theory of Everything, a replacement to Relativity, or something similar then please publish it in a journal rather than in my comments.
Comments against the spirit of these ground rules may be removed.











* required fields