A Universe of Possibilities
Over the course of billions of years, a new home is built. It will eventually house stars, planets and perhaps civilizations. The force of gravity and the conservation of momentum can transform a dense cloud of cold dust and gas into a menagerie of stars and myriad opportunities for life. The stuff of stars is the stuff of us.
This particular distant galactic home, NGC 1398, lives in the Fornax cluster of galaxies 65 million light-years away (or one billion round trips between New York City and Los Angeles). It is farther away from us each day, moving away at 1400 kilometers per second–over 3 million miles per hour. For comparison, the NASA space shuttle during launch only moves at 35,000 miles per hour.
At 135,000 light-years in diameter, NGC 1398 is just slightly larger than the galaxy we call home, the Milky Way. Like our home galaxy, it has come to burn with the light of a hundred million suns and who knows how many civilizations.
If you’d like to look for this southern hemisphere gem yourself, it lives at RA/DEC: (03 38.9, -26 20).
We close with a question: Who first wrote the now-famous equation that estimates the probability of life in the universe?
Written by: Det. B. Nord [FNAL]
Image Credit: Erin Sheldon [BNL], Martin Murphy [FNAL]
Dark Energy Detectives 