Do enormous cosmic entities like galaxies collide ? Yes is the answer from the astronomers from the Stony Brook University using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. They have captured the so called “skid” marks or the collision trails of the gargantuan collisions between galaxies, which are called as “Antennae”. The tidal debris left as an aftermath of the collision helps them to find the history of the collision, like the way one can do for a car accident.

Archive for June, 2009
Galactic Collisions - the clash of the titans
Win a Piece of Moon Rock !
Do you wanna be a proud owner of the piece of a moon rock ? Just step yourself into the shoes of Neil Armstrong and say your own “buzz” liner about the landing, similar to what armstrong said, ” One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind !”. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landings by the Apollo 11 mission, New Scientist has come with an online competition where in readers are asked to suggest a better statement what Neil Armstrong could have said. All this for a piece of rock from the very lunar neighbour.
The piece of moon rock is part of a lunar meteorite found by French collector Luc Labenne, in the Dhofar region of Southern Oman, on the eastern border of Yemen.
The deadline to submit your entries to New Scientist website is 5pm GMT on 29 June. The details of the winning entry/entrant would be published in the 18th July issue of New Scientist.
Now, what are you waiting for ? Go grab this chance here
Japan Probe to crash on Moon
Japan aerospace agency JAXA’s lunar orbiter probe Kaguya (formerly SELENE) is all set to impact the surface of the moon on June 11, thursday, completing its two year long mission with a daunting final task of impact landing on moon’s southern hemisphere near the Gill crater (shown in pic).
Kaguya is set to crash into the moon at a lunar latitude of 63° south and longitude of 80° east. Its projected impact site is circled in red in this mosaic of images taken by Europe’s SMART-1 spacecraft, which itself smashed into the moon at the end of its mission in 2006
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The mission is to seek and shed light on the formation and evolution of the moon by studying its composition, gravitational field and surface characteristics. Kaguya deployed two smaller satellites (’Baby Probes’) after reaching lunar orbit that allowed it to relay data to Earth while it was on the moon’s far side and to better measure anomalies in the moon’s gravitational field.
Kaguya has its own ‘firsts’ too. The gravity field mapping of the far side of the moon and also of making the first HD video of the lunar surface.

