ScienceIQ.com

Big Boom

They sound like thunder, but they're not. They're sonic booms, concentrated blasts of sound waves created as vehicles travel faster than the speed of sound. To understand how the booms are created, look to the ocean. ...

Continue reading...

BigBoom
Mathematics

Prime Numbers

A prime number is a number that is divisible only by one and by itself. Factors are numbers that can be divided into a number with no remainder. The factors of 18 are the numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, and ... Continue reading

PrimeNumbers
Biology

Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Human Flu

Influenza, unlike many viruses that make humans sick, can also affect birds and pigs. Generally strains of the influenza virus that causes disease in people are slightly different from those that ... Continue reading

BirdFluSwineFlu
Biology

Now You See It, Now You Don't

What we call light is simply a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation that our eyes are sensitive to. This radiation enters our eyes and is conveyed to the brain by the process we call sight. While ... Continue reading

EMRadiation
Geology

What's In A Name?

Hurricane Elena as seen from the space shuttle. Have you ever wondered how hurricanes get their names? For several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the particular ... Continue reading

HurricaneElena

The Antennae

TheAntennaeNASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered rich deposits of neon, magnesium, and silicon in a pair of colliding galaxies known as The Antennae. The deposits are located in vast clouds of hot gas. When the clouds cool, say scientists, a great number of stars and planets should form. These results may foreshadow the fate of our own Milky Way and its future collision with the Andromeda Galaxy. When galaxies collide, direct hits between stars are extremely rare, but collisions between huge gas clouds in the galaxies trigger a stellar baby boom. Massive newborn stars race through their evolution in a few million years and explode as supernovas. Heavy elements manufactured in these stars are blown away by the explosions and enrich the surrounding gas for thousands of light years.

The supernova rate in The Antennae is about 30 times that of the Milky Way. Supernova explosions heat the gas in these galaxies to millions of degrees Celsius--so hot that they emit X-rays. Such clouds are mostly invisible to optical telescopes, but they are easy targets for the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra data reveal regions of high and varying enrichment. In one cloud, for instance, magnesium and silicon are 16 and 24 times as abundant as in the Sun. As the enriched gas cools, a new generation of stars will form, and with them new planets. A number of studies indicate that clouds enriched in heavy elements are more likely to form stars with planetary systems, so in the future an unusually high number of planets may form in The Antennae. At a distance of about 60 million light years, The Antennae system is the nearest example of a collision between two large galaxies.

The collision, which began a couple of hundred million years ago, has been so violent that gas and stars from the galaxies have been ejected into the two long arcs that give the system its name. The Antennae give a closeup view of the type of collisions that were common in the crowded early universe and likely led to the formation of many of the stars that exist in the universe today. They might also provide a glimpse of the future of our Milky Way galaxy, which is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. At the present rate, a crash such as the one now occurring in the Antennae could happen in about 3 billion years. Tremendous gravitational forces will disrupt both galaxies and reform them, probably as a giant elliptical galaxy peppered with hundreds of millions of young Sun-like stars. And maybe hundreds of millions of habitable planets, too. These violent crashes aren't an end, after all. They're a new beginning.