Space Fangasm

Celebrate our friendly neighborhood star stuff with this Solar Orbit Necklace. Its 21" length features not only the Sun and all the planets (including the one that got voted off the island), but also our Moon and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And there’s a little star shaped charm hanging off the 3" extender, like a comet. For those who are about to complain that the beads are not to scale, here’s the deal: we wanted you to be able to lift your head despite the asteroids in the belt being visible. We think that’s a fair trade-off.

Which one of them is the GFFA, I wonder?

My bet’s on either Malin 1 or NGC 4921.

“Immeasurable heaven” - Laniakea: Our home supercluster

New ‘super spiral’ class of galaxy discovered

“We have found a previously unrecognized class of spiral galaxies that are as luminous and massive as the biggest, brightest galaxies we know of,” announced Patrick Ogle, an astrophysicist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of a new paper on the findings published in the Astrophysical Journal. This new galaxy class, called super spirals, have long hidden in plain sight by mimicking the appearance of typical spiral galaxies.

Ogle and colleagues chanced upon them in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), an online repository containing information on over 100 million galaxies. NED brings together a wealth of data from many different projects.

“Remarkably, the finding of super spiral galaxies came out of purely analyzing the contents of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, thus reaping the benefits of the careful, systematic merging of data from many sources on the same galaxies,” said George Helou, a study co-author and the executive director of IPAC. “NED is surely holding many more such nuggets of information, and it is up to us scientists to ask the right questions to bring them out.”

Super spirals can shine with eight to 14 times the brightness of the Milky Way. They possess as much as 10 times our home galaxy’s mass. Their starry disks stretch from twice to even four times the width of the Milky Way’s approximately 100,000 light-year-wide disk, with the largest super spiral spanning an astonishing 440,000 light-years. We’re talking about sizes so huge our minds could never grasp them.

Galaxies

This was a experimental digital piece but I am SO happy with how it turned out!  I have at least two more like this I’ve already thought up and I’m hoping to make a little series with these kind of designs~

@inkwellwriter5

All the darkness brings out the light inside of me