ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2010) — At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy. |
Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world’s second fastest supercomputer. |
| The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Read more at www.sciencedaily.com |
“…Our observations also suggest that the Triangulum Galaxy is being ripped apart by Andromeda.”
Andromeda, and our own galaxy the Milky Way, are the two largest members of a small cluster of galaxies known as the Local Group. Triangulum, the third largest member of the Local Group, is about one-tenth the size of Andromeda.
“Within a few billion years Triangulum will be completely destroyed by Andromeda and its stars will be dispersed throughout the Andromeda halo,” says Dr. Widrow. “And a few billion years after that, Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide and merge together to form a giant elliptical galaxy.” | An international team of astronomers, including Queen’s University physicist Larry Widrow, have uncovered evidence of a nearby cosmic encounter. Their study indicates that the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, the two galaxies closest to our own, collided about two to three billion years ago.
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Dr. Widrow, along with John Dubinsky of the University of Toronto, recreated this galactic encounter using a high performance computer and theoretical modeling. Their simulations illustrate how the strong gravitational field of Andromeda could have pulled stars away from the Triangulum disk creating a stream just as the team saw.
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The Pan-Andromeda Archeological Survey (PAndAS), led by Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria BC, is using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope to map the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. This map, the largest of its kind, will allow astronomers to test the hypothesis that galaxies grow by “cannibalizing” other galaxies.
Read more at www.labspaces.net |
| Astronomers have found a giant planet orbiting so close to its parent star that it’s bound to spiral inward to its doom or else be ripped to shreds by the star’s gravity. Either way, the planet called WASP-18b should provide astronomers with a mother lode of data about the delicate gravitational balancing act that affects all solar systems. |
| WASP-18b and its star are so close to each other that it takes the planet |
| less than a day to complete a revolution. As it orbits, WASP-18b drags bulges tens of kilometers high around the star’s equator, making it spin faster. Those same forces also cost the planet its angular momentum, pulling it inward, eventually to the point where it will smash into the star’s surface. Or perhaps it will be shredded to form a Saturn-like ring system. In either case, WASP-18b appears doomed to die within half a million years. |
| “It’s the find of a lifetime,” |
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