Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Galaxies Make Disruptive Neighbors
Organization: Astrosphere New Media
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1447/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is 365 Days of Astronomy. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
Galaxies Make Disruptive Neighbors
Star-filled galaxies like the Milky Way are not just randomly scattered across the Universe, they are found in groups or clusters. For example, our Galaxy is a member of the so-called “Local Group” along with around 30 other galaxies.
There are 2 other largish galaxies in our group besides us, with numerous dwarf and small irregular galaxies making up the rest of the total. Galaxy clusters are simply much larger versions of groups.
If you imagine that galaxy groups are like towns, and galaxy clusters are like cities then galaxy superclusters are like the countries that these towns and cities lie within.
But the story doesn’t end there. All of the galaxy superclusters in the Universe form what we call the ‘cosmic web’.
An artist created the purple picture used for today’s album artwork to show a section of that cosmic web. Like a spider web, you can see that it has a delicate lace-like pattern that criss-crosses over the entire cosmos, where each dot is a galaxy like our Milky Way.
A new study of the cosmic web by astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, has revealed secrets about its role in the history of the Universe.
A long time ago, when the Universe was just half its current age, galaxies that were caught in the denser parts of the cosmic web began to speed through their lives much faster than those found elsewhere, like in the thiner filaments where there are fewer galaxies or outside the filaments altogether in the voids between them.
Astronomers think that this happened because of something like peer-pressure from nearby galaxies. Galaxies that were clustered in the lumps or knots along the filaments of the cosmic web would gravitationally interact in ways that caused them to quickly use up their gas making new stars and this rushed them toward the end of their lives!
Furthermore, the filaments seem to have pre-processed galaxies and funneled them into the denser clusters where the galaxies seem to get fully processed and end up as dead galaxies with little or no star formation happening in them.
Here’s a Cool Fact:
If the Milky Way galaxy was the size of a sesame seed, then the cosmic web of the observable universe would be the size of Great Pyramid of Giza. And we have no idea how much universe lies outside the area that we can observe. Maybe thousands of times more! Maybe millions!
Thank you for listening to 365 Days of Astronomy!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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