Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Lions in the Cosmic Zoo
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1118/
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: Lions in the Cosmic Zoo
The photo in today’s album artwork was taken with a new telescope called the VST. You might remember the VST from a couple weeks ago from the UNAWE episode “Astronomy in the Desert” which I recorded.
It’s the survey telescope that shares the Paranal Observatory’s flattened mountaintop with the 4 giant VLT telescopes. It’s the telescope with the giant OmegaCAM camera on it. That camera was used to take this image.
It shows three galaxies that are known as the Leo Triplet. You might remember them from the Feb 28th 2016 UNAWE I recorded about them, where I told you that the 3 galaxies are nicknamed the “Leo Trio”.
The Leo Trio is composed of: M65, M66 and, edge on to us and appearing as a straight line of stars, NGC 3628. They are about 35 million light years away from us.
In that episode I talked about how the galaxy on the lower right hand side, called Messier 66, also known as NGC 3627, is being pulled out of shape by the other 2 galaxies. It’s not symmetrical any more.
Gravity works!
Large telescopes can normally study only one of these galaxies at a time. But the VST, being a wide field survey telescope, can get all three members of the group in a single picture!
This image also contains the tracks of several asteroids within the Solar System that have moved across the images during the exposures. In the full sized image they show up as short lines and at least ten can be seen in this picture.
As Leo is a zodiacal constellation, lying in the plane of the Solar System, the number of asteroids is particularly high.
The Leo Trio galaxies are found in the springtime constellation Leo. I say “springtime” because the constellation is easy to see then just after the Sun goes down.
You can see it in the fall & winter too if you wait up long enough at night for it to rise in the East. It’ll be nearly dawn if it’s the fall when you go looking for Leo.
Thousands of years ago before we had books, movies & TV to amuse us, people looked at the night sky and told each other stories about the stars.
The word ‘Leo’ is from Greek and is Leon or Lion, so this constellation, with a good dose of imagination, is supposed to look like a lion.
You might already know the names of some other constellations, such as Taurus, Virgo and Pisces, from horoscopes in the newspapers. These constellations are called zodiac constellations.
They are located in the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. We call this flat plane the ecliptic.
Using these zodiac constellations to predict people’s futures is called astrology. However, today every astronomer knows that this is nonsense, as zodiac constellations don’t have any effect on people’s lives!
If the planet Mars, the red planet, is rising in the East at the moment you’re born, astrologers will tell you that you’re going to be a great warrior and slay your enemies with your sword, and your sword will be red with their blood just like Mars is red.
But the truth is, you’re just as likely to be a school teacher. Maybe you’ll use a red pencil to grade papers and slay your worst students!
Sadly, there are people today who firmly believe in astrology. When the planet Mercury orbits the Sun, from our vantage point here on Earth, Mercury appears half of the time to be moving toward the Sun and the other half it appears to be moving away from the Sun.
When it’s moving away from the Sun in the sky we call that prograde motion. And when it’s moving toward the Sun we call that retrograde motion.
Modern astrologers regard the retrograde motion of Mercury as a bad portent for communication of all sorts. They warn their gullible clients to be especially careful with their communications during Mercury’s retrograde periods.
Why communication? Well it’s simple. The god Mercury is the messenger of the gods, so he is the god of communications.
Isn’t that just absurd? Here we are in 2016, with our robots populating the planet Mars, human footprints and 3 cars parked on the Moon and these folks want to believe in this nonsense.
It is common for people to mix up the words ‘astronomy’ and ‘astrology’, they sound similar but they are very different. Astronomy is a science, but astrology is not!
Through the 1600s the science of astronomy burst forth from the telescopes of the time and we discovered that we and the other planets orbit the Sun, thus undermining the very foundations upon which astrology is built.
So by the 1700s astrology was replaced by astronomy in universities and astrology was revealed to be the superstition it is.
People are weird, I suppose. Once they seize upon a belief they reject all contradicting evidence and double down on their belief. They hate to admit that they were wrong.
They’ve even said to me “You’re just closed minded!” However, as a scientist, I have a very open mind when it comes to new ideas. They have to have good evidence, though.
Present me with evidence for astrology and I’ll say “How about that!” and drop my old ideas in a flash! But it has to be good evidence, not anecdotes. As my skeptic pals say: “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
Hey, Here’s a Cool Fact
There are actually 13 zodiac constellations, not 12. Astrologers ignore the large, dim summertime constellation Ophiuchus and say that there are only 12 zodiac constellations!
They also have the wrong dates for when the Sun is in these constellations. This error is due to the Earth’s precession of the equinoxes, which is due mostly to the gravitational pull of the Moon.
In a couple thousand years our pole star won’t be Polaris any more, but it’ll be the star Er Rai, also known as Gamma Cephei, in the constellation Cepheus, the King.
In Greek mythology, this Cepheus is the King of Aethiopia, the father of the beautiful Princess Andromeda, who also gets a constellation named after her.
So he was likely black.
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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