Physical SciencesWordPress.com

Triton Station

Triton Station
A Blog About the Science and Sociology of Cosmology and Dark Matter
Home PageAtom FeedMastodon
language
Published

I have been spending a lot of time lately writing up a formal paper on high redshift galaxies, so haven’t had much time to write here. The paper is a lot more involved than I told you so, but yeah, I did. Repeatedly. I do have a start on a post on self-interacting dark matter that I hope eventually to get back to. Today, I want to give a quick note about the MHONGOOSE survey. But first, a non-commercial interruption.

Published

When we look up at the sky, we see stars. Stars are the building blocks of galaxies; we can see the stellar disk of the galaxy in which we live as the vault of the Milky Way arching across the sky. When we look beyond the Milky Way, we see galaxies. Just as stars are the building blocks of galaxies, galaxies are the building blocks of the universe.

Published

“Galaxies are made of stars.” Bob Schommer, quoted by Dave Silva in his dissertation on stellar populations This tongue-in-cheek quote is a statement of the obvious, at least for the 90+ years since Hubble established that galaxies are stellar systems comparable to and distinct from the Milky Way.

Published

Galaxies are big. Our own Milky Way contains about fifty billion solar masses of stars, and another ten billion of interstellar gas, roughly speaking. The average star is maybe half a solar mass, so crudely speaking, that’s one hundred billion stars. Give or take. For comparison, the population of the Earth has not quite reached eight billion humans.