APOD 2.3

11/09/2010 NGC 4452: An Extremely Thin Galaxy

At first I thought this was a picture of a frisbee in space, but it turned out to be a view of galaxy NGC 4452 from the plane of the galaxy itself, which is even cooler! It is located in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, which is the closest to the to the Milky Way. It is a lenticular galaxy, which is a disc galaxy that's used up most of its interstellar matter. It is roughly as thick as the Milky Way. The picture is almost perfectly edge-on with this galaxy. This would probably greatly surprise the average person who doesn't know much about astronomy, because they think it's all just stars and bright spots of light, whereas there are actually lots of interesting shapes like this line segment or molecular dust clouds.

APOD 2.2

10/30/2010 Ghost of the Cepheus Flame

This picture is very frightening. The molecular dust cloud kind of looks like a seahorse. The constellation Cepheus contains several star forming regions. The Cepheus Flare is a star forming region of low and intermediate mass. The main nebula is the Ghost Nebula, whose brown color is caused by the stars behind it. The double stars are the beginnings of a binary star. It's fitting that they used a picture of the ghost nebula on the day before Halloween.

APOD 2.4

The 11/14/2010 picture is an artist's representation of the concept of the multiverse. Obviously one cannot take a picture of an alternate universe, as with most astronomical phenomena, so the picture is really just a chance for the artist to doodle some circles and neat colors and call it a multiverse. Essentially, the multiverse is the collection of universes. Many scientists don't even agree that there are other universes, but they are hypothesized to explain where matter goes when it falls into a black hole, for example. It is very tantalizing to ponder what life is like for parallel analogues of myself in other universes. For instance, while I chose to eat a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich for lunch today, my parallel twin might have eaten a Caesar salad. Scientists are pondering other, less important issues pertaining to the multiverse, but there is virtually no way to empirically test them.