How Far Away Is It - go to https://youtu.be/WLWsPNMPWFY

here's a map of our local superclusters including the Virgo supercluster as you can see galaxies and clusters of galaxies are not uniformly distributed in the universe instead they collect into vast clusters filaments and walls of galaxies interspersed with large voids in which very few galaxies seem to exist a filament is constructed of galaxies and galaxy clusters the Perseus Pegasus filament is an example walls are much wider and thicker than filaments here we see the Fornax Centaurus sculptor and the great wall or coma wall the great wall is one of the longest known super structures in the universe it is approximately 200 million light years away and measures over 500 million light years long 300 million light years wide and 16 million light years thick voids are the vast empty spaces between filaments which contain very few or no galaxies at all there are 25 major voids in our local super clusters only a few are marked here the sculptor void is the largest in the nearby universe let's take a look at some of the super clusters and some of the galaxies photographed by Hubble that are contained in these super clusters the Hydra super cluster is close to the Virgo supercluster and similar in size and shape to it it's about 100 million light-years long and contains the large Hydra galaxy cluster this map plots every bright galaxy in the super cluster the galaxies in the super cluster range from 150 to 200 million light-years away here is a picture of the Hydra cluster the white blobs in this picture are the galaxies in the cluster the bright orange star in the center is a nearby red giant in the clusters line-of-sight not actually in the cluster here's a unique galaxy pair in Hydra through an extraordinary chance of alignment a face on spiral galaxy lies precisely in front of another larger spiral this lineup provides us with the rare chance visualize dark material within the front galaxy seen only because it is silhouetted against the object behind it the bright blue stars forming a pinwheel shape near the center of the front galaxy have formed recently from interstellar gas and dust a small red patch near the centre of the image is the bright nucleus of the background galaxy NGC 3314 be the Centaurus supercluster is the closest neighbor of our Virgo supercluster it contains a number of large galaxy clusters including the Centaurus cluster the galaxies in the super cluster range modern 50 to 200 million light years away this map plots the brightest galaxies in this area of the sky here is a picture of the Centaurus cluster it is one of the most massive assemblages of galaxies in the nearby universe note that the plane of our galaxy cuts its way through this region of sky so any photographs will be contaminated by a large number of foreground Milky Way stars here's a magnificent view of the spiral galaxy NGC 46 o3 in the Centaurus cluster it is the most distant galaxy in which sea Fiat variables have been found clusters of young bright blue stars highlight the galaxy's spiral arms in contrast red giant stars in the process of dying are also found only the very brightest stars in NGC 46 o3 can be seen individually much of the diffused glow comes from fainter stars that cannot be individually distinguished here is another galaxy in the Centaurs cluster the image shows NGC 46 22 and its outer pair of winding arms full of new stars shown in blue astronomers are puzzled by its clockwise rotation because of the direction of the outer spiral arms appointing most spiral galaxies have arms of gas and stars the trail behind as they turn but this galaxy has two leading outer arms to point toward the direction of the galaxy's clockwise rotation located about 130 million light-years away in the Centaurus cluster NGC 4650 a is one of only a hundred known polar ring galaxies their unusual disk ring structure is not yet well understood one possibility is that polar rings are the remnants of colossal collisions between two galaxies sometime in the distant past probably at least a billion years ago NGC 46 96 is an elliptical galaxies in this antara cluster in fact it is the brightest galaxies in the cluster this composite image was taken in a study of the galaxies central black hole it shows a vast cloud of hot gas in red surrounding high-energy bubbles 10,000 light years across in blue the green dots in the image show infrared radiation from star clusters on the outer edges of the galaxy the Perseus pisces super cluster is a long dense wall of galaxies with a length of almost 300 million light years that is around 250 million light years away it is one of the largest known structures in the universe this plot of the brightest galaxies in a super cluster show how prominent it is at the left end of the super cluster is the massive Perseus cluster one of the most massive clusters of galaxies within 500 million light years this picture shows the central part of the Perseus cluster as with the others we've seen it is crowded with Milky Way stars in the foreground that show up as faint dots here we are zooming into the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1275 in the Perseus cluster we see fine thread like filamentary structures in the gas surrounding the galaxy the red filaments are composed of cool gas being suspended by a magnetic field and are surrounded by the hundred million degree fahrenheit hot gas in the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster the filaments are dramatic markers of the feedback process through which energy is transformed from the central mass black hole to the surrounding gas the filaments originated when cool gas is transported from the center of the galaxy by radio bubbles the rise in the hot interstellar gas the coma supercluster is a nearby super cluster of galaxies that includes the famous Coma Cluster Abel 1656 located 300 million light-years from Earth it is roughly spherical about 20 million light-years in diameter and contains more than 3000 galaxies being one of the first super clusters to be discovered coma super cluster helped astronomers understand the large-scale structure of the universe this map plots the brightest galaxies in coma super clusters region of the sky a coma cluster has received a huge amount of scientific research this is partly because it lays a long way from the plane of our galaxy and it is largely unobstructed by any gas dust or foreground stars there's also one obvious foreground star in this image it's less than one millionth of the distance to the Coma Cluster you here we are zooming into NGC 4921 it is one of the rare spirals in the coma cluster and a rather unusual one it is an example of an anemic spiral where the normal vigorous star formation that creates a spiral galaxies' familiar bright arms is much less intense as a result there is just a delicate swirl of dust in a ring around the galaxy accompanied by some bright young stars NGC 49.87 against glowing newborn star clusters and iridescent pink clouds of hydrogen the existence of which indicates ongoing star formation 4911 and other spirals near the center of the cluster are being transformed by the gravitational tug of their neighbors in the case of 4911 wispy arcs of the galaxy's outer spiral arm are being pulled and distorted by forces from a companion galaxy NGC 49 the resultant stripped material will eventually be dispersed throughout the core of the coma cluster where it will fuel the intergalactic population of stars and star clusters here are the distances to a few additional superclusters in our local group Hercules is four hundred million light years away Leo is four hundred and fifty million light years away Shapley is five hundred million light years away where ollege IAM is nine hundred million light years away and Corona borealis is 1 billion light years away there's one more thing about the galaxies in our local super clusters they all have an unusual peculiar motion normally galaxies are expected to have a motion consistent with the Hubble flow that is given the Hubble law and the distance to the galaxy its velocity is set but in our local area within 1 billion light years there is an additional flow superimposed on the Hubble flow it appears that our galaxy and a large number of the galaxies super clusters in our area are flowing toward what is called the Great Attractor initially it looked like the Great Attractor was located close to the Norma cluster not too far from the Centaurus super cluster but norma is so close to our galactic plain or area of avoidance that we cannot see into it very well more recently though updates to motion vectors indicate that the flow is not so much to the Norma cluster but to the much more massive Shockley super cluster behind it now let's take a look at a few more galaxies found in our local super clusters this is an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk the strong warping of the disk indicates that this galaxy has recently undergone a collision with a nearby galaxy and is in the process of swallowing it in the outer regions especially on the right hand side of the image we see that the twisted disc contains not only dark dust but also bright clouds of blue stars this shows that hot young stars are being formed in the disk astronomers believe that the formation of new stars may be triggered by collisions between galaxies as their interstellar clouds smash together and are compressed the appearance of a galaxy can depend strongly on the color of the light with which it is viewed this galaxy when seen in visible light exhibits tightly wound spiral arms that give it a pinwheel shape similar to that of many other spirals however when the galaxy is viewed in ultraviolet light its shape is startlingly different ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength than ordinary visible light and is emitted from stars that are much hotter than the Sun at ultraviolet wavelengths which are rendered as blue in his Hubble image we see a spectacular nearly circular bright ring surrounding its nucleus the ring marks the presence of many recently formed hot stars the spectacular edge-on galaxy is believed to be the home of an intermediate mass black hole that may have been stripped off of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy the estimated 20,000 solar mass black hole lies above the Galactic plane this is an unlikely place for such a massive black hole to exist unless it belonged to a small galaxy that was gravitationally torn apart by this one the circle identifies a unique x-ray source that pinpoints the black hole here we are zooming into Stephan's quintet as the name implies it is a group of five galaxies the name however is a bit of a misnomer studies have shown the group member NGC 7320 is actually a foreground galaxy and 40 million light-years it is about seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group three of the galaxies have distorted shapes elongated spiral arms and long gaseous tidal tails containing myriad star clusters proof of their close encounters these interactions have sparked a frenzy of star birth in the central pair of galaxies 73 19 is a barred spiral galaxy with distinct spiral arms that follow along 180 degrees back to the bar continuing clockwise the next galaxy appears to have to course but it is actually two galaxies 7318 a and 7318 B NGC 73 17 is a normal-looking elliptical galaxy that is less affected by the interactions these farther members are markedly redder than the foreground galaxy suggesting that older stars reside in their course this visible light Hubble picture reveals an intergalactic pipeline of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago the pipeline the dark string of matter begins in 1410 the galaxies on the Left crosses over 20,000 light-years of intergalactic space and wraps around 1409 the companion galaxy on the right here we are zooming into three galaxies that appear to be partially overlapping in the image below they may be at somewhat different distances the spiral shapes of two of these galaxies appear mostly intact the third galaxies on the far left is more compact but shows evidence of star formation this image shows the diverse collection of galaxies in the cluster Abell s 0 7 4 0 the giant elliptical ESO 325 - G 0 0 4 looms large at the cluster Center in the course of analyzing this Hubble image astronomers discovered that ESO 325 is actually a gravitational lens this means that the focusing power of the enormous mass making up the galaxies cause the light from some distant object probably a distant dwarf galaxy to be deflected and magnified as a result the more distant galaxy appears brighter and distorted into the shape of an arc or ring known as an Einstein ring because the phenomenon was first predicted by Albert Einstein a nearly perfect ring of hot bluestar pinwheels about the yellow nucleus of an unusual galaxies known as pose object a blue ring which is dominated by clusters of young massive stars contrasts sharply with the yellow nucleus of mostly old stars what appears to be a gap separating the two stellar populations may actually contain some star clusters that are just too faint to see curiously an object that bears an uncanny resemblance to hos object can be seen in the gap at the one o'clock position the object is probably a background ring galaxy here's another view of our local super clusters I've circled the ones we've covered the empty space is the area we can't see due to the clutter from our own galaxy's disk within this 1 billion light year radius from us there are 100 super clusters 240,000 galaxies groups 3 million large galaxies 60 million dwarf galaxies and 250 thousand trillion stars at this range the Milky Way is too small to show up our entire local volume is little more than a dot but the entire map only represents about 7 percent of the entire visible universe in this segment we've seen several interacting galaxies so before we conclude the video book covering the cosmos as a whole we'll take a closer look in our next segment and what it means for galaxies to collide

Channel: David Butler

Views: 331,075

Keywords: howfarawayisit, \how far away is it\, \david butler\, filaments, void, Sculuptor, Perseus, Pegasus, Fornax, Centaurus, \Great Wall\, \coma wall\, Hydra, \NGC 2314\, \ngc 4603\, \ngc 4622\, Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, telescope, ESO, \ngc 4650\, \ngc 4696\, \ngc 1275\, \ngc 4921\, \ngc 4911\, Hercules, Shapely, Horologium, \peculiar motion\, \Great Attractor\, Norma, \Stephan's Quinte\, \Einstein's rings\, Hoag, STEM

Id: KPBcDoqH6ys

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2013