So Encaladus is my new favourite moon of Saturn. Sorry, Titan!
I’d never even heard of it before watching Wonders of the Solar System yesterday evening, but now I’m convinced that it’s the best. It’s smaller than Britain, is smooth one side but cratered on the other, and it has long ridges called the tiger stripes which spurt ice out into space, forming one of Saturn’s rings.
If that’s not enough to make it your favourite too, just thing: what other astronomical body could you misspell as a type of Mexican food? (Which is exactly what I did when Googling it just now, despite Wikipedia’s warning.)
I used to think mere galaxies colliding was impressive, but this is nothing compared to when galaxy clusters hit each other. Boom!
Link
Speaking of galaxies colliding, the program Universe Sandbox allows you to fire ones of your creation at each other and watch the results (albeit with questionable accuracy). You also get to create second star in the middle of the solar system and watch everything go haywire, with planets randomly being ejected into deep space, and being congratulated after you do for destroying all life on earth. Which is always fun. Unfortunately, you only get a one hour trial of the software for free, but that’s still enough time to destroy a good few billions of star systems.
Luckily, there’s quite a lot of other, free software available for looking at and simulating space. Microsoft WorldWide Telescope is almost like an inverted Google Earth, allowing you to pan around the sky and zoom in to high detail imagery like that produced by the Hubble Space Telescope (although Google Earth itself does something similar now). Stellarium is good for identifying objects that you’re able to see in the night sky, and for also showing you exactly what you’re not able to see by living in a smoggy city. And Celestia allows you to zoom around a 3D universe in a similar way to Universe Sandbox, although you’re not able to introduce a black hole here and there and watch the celestial chaos unfold. It seems omnipotence costs nothing, but destructive omnipotence is chargeable.
This is a great video of how the night sky might change if, as predicted, the galaxy Andromeda collides with our own Milky Way five billion of years from now. The bigger the things that are hitting each other the better, as far as I’m concerned.
More here.
Ever since Pluto’s demotion to a plutoid, Mercury has become the solar system’s smallest planet proper. And it’s only getting smaller. Poor thing, it must be bad for the ego.
