No Life Here
July 23, 2008
Looking for life in the universe? Here’s one place you can skip: a new view of the Pinwheel Galaxy, aka Messier 101, in infrared light shows a coral-red outer ring devoid of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
If you’re wondering what those are take a look in your barbecue pit, your car’s exhaust pipe or anyplace combustion takes place, advises the witty Whitney Clavin, a CalTech press officer who covers news from the Spitzer Space Telescope team.
She reports on a paper in this week’s Astrophysical Journal explaining why Pinwheel’s outer rim is red not blue like the interior arms. Seems radiation has killed off the carbon-containing molecules at the galaxy’s edge.
"There's a threshold at the rim of this galaxy, where the organic material is getting destroyed," says Karl Gordon of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.
Image tech specs: infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns in blue; 8 microns in green; 24 microns in red. Image taken with Spitzer infrared array camera, multiband imaging photometer and infrared spectrograph. Not available in stores.
Looks ALIVE to me!
Posted by: waycool | July 23, 2008 at 08:57 PM
So...there's no chance for organic material to exist inside that galaxy because they found an explosive ring around the outside?
Two thoughts, recycling? I assume that there should be factories of organic matter (or...where does the water in come from in asteroids?)
Secondly, and I guess this is the sci-fi poking out, but why does life only include organic material? Nitrogen based sentience is...well...theorized!
Posted by: JS | July 24, 2008 at 12:38 AM
I love how your titles are always largely presumptive and not what the following article is actually about. It's refreshing that I can find tabloid reporting mixed in with science!
Posted by: Eric Jones | July 24, 2008 at 07:26 AM
I have a question???? Im no scientist or anything but how do we know that the equipment that is being used is acurate at that distance??? How do we know that the colors we are seeing are what they are and not something else due to distance or anything else that may interfear in between?
Posted by: S.S. | July 24, 2008 at 10:33 AM
The people of the Pinwheel Galaxy are not going to be very happy about your article headline. In fact I bet that the GCPG, Galactic Council of the Pinwheel Galaxy, are right now voting to boycott radio transmissions from planet earth.
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