Boredom leads to fascinating discoveries on occasion. Boredom? Well, the Olympics' two weeks of wall-to-wall coverage is over, regular programming is coming back amid a ton of reruns, so there's some new stuff to watch, but all is mostly indoor activities still, despite the calendar building up with all kinds of medical appointments with more to schedule. There's no heading out to see the newest flower in the yard, or just walk down to the lake to see which birds are back north yet. Some snow has gone, but keeps getting replaced, including by ice, all of which reinforces the "keep indoors" injunction for anybody not willing to risk certain kinds of accidents. Even the garbage goes out to the big cans without one leaving the porch, and the cans don't actually fill often enough to require weekly hauling curbside. And no, spring housecleaning is NOT on the agenda! Yes, the dirt is visible, but the will to push the body right now has gone walkabout - ironic since the body itself can't. Even a pile of tax documents are sitting on a table sneering at me.
So there's lots of time spent online. Some of course is spent writing, including here. Other time is spent reading weird stuff, or at least weird for a lot of people. I got introduced to "Science X Newsletter" over a year ago, and get a new email containing dozens of links in various categories five days a week. Sometimes they build up, sometimes they are promptly devoured. I tend to ignore chemistry, physics, and astronomy, and stick with biology, earth news, medical news, and sometimes pop in to read "other". I might not get to one for a week, as a bunch piles up, but they don't go away until I delete them. Sometimes it's accidentally, though I did fix that glitch a while ago. In the beginning I tried to read everything and not just the teaser first paragraph, but the load grew heavier of unread stuff beckoning.
Suddenly it changed. The folks putting it out decided they either needed my money to keep reading any and everything that caught my interest, or I'd have to wade through ads for every in depth article I read. Screw that! OK, sure, I agree that they're worth it. The service is invaluable. But so are a lot of things online, and my budget isn't that accommodating, especially these last months when I'm not working. Five dollars a month here, and ten there, can build up in a hurry. I can't support them all. Decisions needed to be made.
Since I still get the very short version of each newsletter, meaning a title and a couple sentences, sometimes a very tiny photo or indecipherable diagram, I can still browse through those. If something is really compelling, I can pull up the full article and fight a system of ads which has a very poor history of letting you clear it off the page after reading/watching it fully, meaning it still covers the article I clicked over to read even after the video ends. The result is it gets quicker and quicker to go through the teaser titles to see what's going on.
If something looks more interesting, I find myself noting a key word or two and heading elsewhere trying to find more information. Maybe Google. Or Wikipedia even. I've been surprised by how brand new concepts (to me) wind up there, though the opposite is also true, and whatever it was doesn't seem to exist. Today was a good day.
Science X Newsletter had a teaser on jellyfish galaxies. What? Never heard of them. You? The thumbnail photo didn't really give me a clue, so first Google then Wikipedia. Both had information, or at least enough that I now know a bit what they're talking about. I'll even pass on the simple layman's version, since you've read this far.
I presume you are familiar with our own galaxy and its shape as spiral galaxy, more or less two dimensional with arms spinning off in curves along a relatively flat plane, maybe (or most likely?) with a black hole in the center. Got that image? If not, go Google it.... or use whatever search engine you please.
OK, now imagine something huge, like perhaps another spiral galaxy (don't ask me, I'm not sure) rams into it fairly flatly (aka broadside) and knocks a bunch of combined stuff through the "flat" to the other side, and some of that kind of dangles in strings as if still attached to the galaxy but trying to move away. What's left of the original flattish spiral along with what it gained from whatever rammed into it that couldn't escape (yet?) now resembles the head of a jellyfish. The tendrils of escaping matter - stars, planets, dust clouds, nebulas - that haven't fully separated (yet) appear to be hanging below, like those on a jellyfish. (I doubt they move like an ocean jellyfish, but that would be interesting! Likely very destructive as well.) Scientists describe the cause of this as ramming, so I'd guess there's enough color shift to suggest it's all still in motion. I haven't read the article for the above stated reasons.
I have no idea whether these are supposed to be static in their new confirmation, but I can't imagine they would be, just that the moment in time we observe them shows them that way, just like any constellation in our sky seems permanent. We know things move and that different forces like gravity hold them in a pattern. Observe our solar system, everything moving yet staying much the same. We can observe the evidence left of collisions in the distant past from craters on the moon, or even here on earth. Some of us have seen comets breaking up within our lifetimes, like Shoemaker-Levy 9 falling into Jupiter back in 1994 in 21 pieces.
Now go look up jellyfish galaxies and let your imaginations play, or bring out your crayons and design your own versions. Have fun! It's that or knock yourself flat on your ass with awe and/or fear.
You do you.
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