Lisa Harvey-Smith - When Galaxies Collide

WHEN

GALAXIES

COLLIDE

WHEN

GALAXIES

COLLIDE

LISA
HARVEY
SMITH

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton,Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2018

Text Lisa Harvey-Smith, 2018

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Peter Long

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522873191 (paperback)

9780522873207 (ebook)

To Shell, who supports my every dream
and to my family, who gave me my love of the stars

CONTENTS

Posing with my BMX aged 12 in our garden in 1992. This back garden was also used as my first astronomical observatory, albeit with no equipment, around the same time.

Pointing to Comet Hyakutake from my dark skies spot in dog shit alley, Wethersfield, UK. I lined up the camera on my tripod, set the camera up for a 20-second exposure, during which time I had to stand very still. Not bad for a 16-year-old beginner!

With my dad Dave and sister Cassie on the front step of our Wethersfield home, taken approximately 1999.

Celebrating Englands progress in the 2002 football World Cup with a friend in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I was a very serious student of astrophysics at the citys university at the time. Lisa Harvey-Smith

We cant see our home galaxy because were inside it, but this is a pretty accurate artists rendering of the Milky Way, adapted from NASA/ESA images of similar spiral galaxies. Nick Risinger, NASA/ESA

The local group of galaxies, our home and future mosh pit of collisions. Andrew Z Colvin

On our 2016 Australian tour of The Last Man on the Moon, Apollo astronaut Gene Cernans best friend and decorated US Navy pilot Fred Baldy Baldwin flicks through the manual of our small twin-propellor plane. He was trying to fix the air-conditioning system, which was baking us pretty badly. Lisa Harvey-Smith

Hard at work picking grapes at Nobel prize-winner Brian Schmidts place. Michelle Reid

An early morning run at Boolardy Homestead near the site of the Square Kilometre Array telescope in Western Australia. This was just before I had a rather exciting run-in with an emu. Lisa Harvey-Smith

Supernova 1006, which was observed as a dazzling star visible during the daytime by Chinese astronomerswhen it exploded just over 1,000 years ago. All that is left now is this glowing cloud of gases from the stellar explosion. NASA, ESA and Zolt Levay (STScI)

Willem Baan and me up all night searching in vain for massive stars in nearby galaxies at the Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany. Lisa Harvey-Smith

Trying not to look down as I ascended the Arecibo radio telescope in the wee small hours. Lisa Harvey-Smith

A signal sent into space by humans in 1974, advertising our presence. The message, devised by astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, was sent towards the globular cluster M13 in binary. It contains mathematics (white), chemicals (green), the structure of DNA (green, white and blue), our body shape (headless, in red), our position in the solar system (yellow) and a representation of the transmitting Arecibo telescope (purple). This is a pictorial representation by Arne Nordmann (norro)Own drawing, 2005, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=365130

Catching up with paperwork as my observations proceed through the night on the 305-metre diameter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Lisa Harvey-Smith

My wooden hut at the Arecibo radio telescope, where I had the *ahem* incident and locked myself out. Lisa Harvey-Smith

With Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin before the Melbourne show of his live on stage tour Buzz Aldrin: Mission to Mars in 2015. My role was to provide an introduction to the shows.

The active galaxy Centaurus A. High-energy particles stream millions of light years into space from the heart of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is ingesting stars and gas. These particles emit radio waves and are seen by radio telescope as the purple emission in this image. The smallest structure visible in the image is 210 light years across: the scale bar represents about 163,000 light years.