July 24, 2007

I kept seeing a Pinwheel, the child's toy. I thought it might reference a Pinwheel Effect or Archetype ('folded' geometry, rotating fan blades, spin, the movement of consciousness in and out of reality, Fibonacci Numbers, Golden Proportion, etc.), but that lead nowhere. What I discovered was the Pinwheel Galaxy was the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Yet, I sensed something more related to pinwheels. Searching google. Suddenly there it was ... the place Z wanted me to find-- the Spaceflight website - February 28, 2006. Z's messages are highlighted in bold.

This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the best known examples of grand design spirals, and its supergiant star-forming regions in unprecedented detail. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released. Giant galaxies weren't assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy). The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released from Hubble. The galaxy's portrait is actually composed from 51 individual Hubble exposures, in addition to elements from images from ground-based photos. The final composite image measures a whopping 16,000 by 12,000 pixels.

The Hubble observations that went into assembling this image composite were retrieved from the Hubble archive and were originally acquired for a range of Hubble projects: determining the expansion rate of the universe; studying the formation of star clusters in giant starbirth regions; finding the stars responsible for intense X-ray emission and discovering blue supergiant stars. As an example of the many treasures hiding in this immense image, a group led by K.D. Kuntz (Johns Hopkins University and NASA) recently catalogued nearly 3000 previously undetected star clusters in it.

The giant spiral disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across or nearly twice the diameter of our Milky Way. The galaxy is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars. Approximately 100 billion of these stars alone might be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime. Hubble's high resolution reveals millions of the galaxy's individual stars in this image.



Upper left: Background galaxies far behind the Pinwheel Galaxy. The galaxies are clearly reddened by the dust in the Pinwheel. Upper middle: Dust lanes in the Pinwheel galaxy. The dust particles scatter blue light the most and therefore colour the light from background stars red. The same effect is seen in sunsets on the Earth. Upper right: A selection of some of the millions of individual stars visible in Messier 101 with Hubble's sharp vision. In total it is estimated that the Pinwheel galaxy contains about one trillion stars. Lower left: An example of some of the 3000 bright clusters of sizzling newborn blue stars in the Pinwheel galaxy. Lower middle: Another "grand design" spiral lies behind the Pinwheel Galaxy itself and is visible through its disk. (That's it!) Lower right: Two distant galaxies behind Messier 101 and a collection of individual foreground stars from one of its spiral arms.

The Pinwheel's spiral arms are sprinkled with large regions of star- forming nebulae. These nebulae are areas of intense star formation within molecular hydrogen clouds. Brilliant young clusters of sizzling newborn blue stars (soul sparks) trace out the spiral arms. The disk of the galaxy is so thin that Hubble easily sees many more distant galaxies lying behind the foreground galaxy.

The Pinwheel Galaxy lies in the northern circumpolar constellation, Ursa Major (from my taping with the History Channel last week ... The Great Bear -- Nostradmus' manuscript had bear images) at a distance of 25 million light-years from Earth. We are seeing the galaxy from Earth today as it was at the beginning of Earth's Miocene Period when mammals flourished and the Mastodon first appeared on Earth. The galaxy fills an area on the sky of one-fifth the area of the full moon.

Pinwheel Galaxy YouTube (59 seconds)

Pinwheel Galaxy Wikipedia

Pinwheel Galaxy (Messier 101) NASA - July 24, 2007

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