Day: September 18, 2021

Rubin’s Galaxy

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In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way’s diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars. That’s about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way. Part of an investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of An Interesting Voyage and astronomer Vera Rubin’s pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies. Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate the dominating presence of dark matter in our universe. via NASA https://ift.tt/2XsmDV6

Wikipedia article of the day for September 18, 2021

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Wikipedia article of the day is Acamptonectes. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Acamptonectes is a genus of ophthalmosaurid ichthyosaur, a type of dolphin-like marine reptile that lived during the Early Cretaceous around 130ย million years ago. The first specimenโ€”a partial adult skeletonโ€”was discovered in Speeton, England, in 1958, but it was not formally described until 2012. Acamptonectes had unusual adaptations that made its trunk rigid, including tightly-fitting bones in the occiput (back and lower part of the skull) and interlocking vertebral centra, likely allowing it to swim at high speeds with a tuna-like form of locomotion. Other distinguishing characteristics include an extremely slender snout and unique ridges on the basioccipital bone of the braincase. As an ichthyosaur, Acamptonectes had large eye sockets and a tail fluke. Its teeth, which were slender and textured with longitudinal ridges, were probably adapted for impaling prey such as squid and fleshy fish.