M53- Which way is up in space? - Deep Sky Videos
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- čas přidán 11. 09. 2024
- We use M53 as bit of an excuse for an up/down north/south space debate. More Messier Objects: bit.ly/MessierO...
Dr Meghan Gray works at the University of Nottingham.
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Videos by Brady Haran
Brady's other channels include:
/ periodicvideos (Chemistry stuff)
/ sixtysymbols (Physics and astronomy)
/ numberphile (Numbers and maths)
/ nottinghamscience (Science and behind the scenes)
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This one, more than any other one, reminded me to remember that we're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour...
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, a sun that is the source of all our power.
That explains why I feel dizzy all the time.
Dr Meghan Gray is showing true scientific humility! I love her and these videos. Thanks Brady ;-)
It would have been great to include a diagram visualising these different allignments with respect to the different scales of view. Tad bit confusing using only hands and an infinitely distracted imagination.
I agree. It is a little confusing.
I always love hearing Gray talk about sciency type things with her soft voice. just makes learning that much better.
10 years
you're welcome again - thank you for watching and commenting
That was very interesting, I didn't know our solar system was tilted on its own axis with respect to the galaxy. Thanks Brady and Dr. Gray!
I like her voice. It's really soothing, my spine does that tingly thing when she talks.
Brady with all your channels, the filming and editing. Do you even get to sleep?!
Anyhow, thanks for all the efforts, your work is amazingly brilliant!
Late getting to this Messier series but I really like the way they've found different things to say about the objects which could be kind of dull and repetitive.
Related: It's a real skill asking good questions and Brady does it as well as pretty much anyone I've ever seen.
Yeah, although I am secretly hoping that one of the final globular cluster videos just has the presenter mention that the object is a globular cluster, then fall asleep mid sentence. Or maybe say that he is going to talk about something more interesting and produce a brick to describe.
Great work to both. The smile of being slightly emabarrassed is a genuine and beautiful smile.
If you were blindfolded and led into a house, and stood somewhere you could see about 2/3 of the stuff in the house, you could come up with a pretty good idea of what the house looked like. Especially if you could see a lot of nearby houses to compare it with.
Thank you! That was very informative for me, and as always, a pleasure to witness Dr. Gray and listen to her sharp explanations.
Wow! I didn't know that solar system plane is at 60 degrees of galactic plane! Knowledge is endless in astronomy / space / astrophysics!
Nice approach to this video, Brady: To use an M object to learn something more fundamental about astronomy. IIRC there are over 50 clusters (globular & open) in the Messier Catalogue and most of them are not among the most fascinating things in the universe; however, there's plenty to learn about astronomy. For my part, I didn't know about north and south in space, so thanks!
This has got to be the GOAT Dr Gray vid! Not only is she putting the geometry of how our little bit of the galaxy spins in perspective, Brady is giving her that huge aussie attitude for being on bottom, er, south 😂 perfection 🤌
Great video! I am a Financial student but am subscribed to a few of your video's and find them very interesting.
Thanks to all the professors who take time out of their days to make these videos, and thank you Brady!
I never would have thought that the ecliptic is tilted that much to the galactic plane 60° woa...
*speechless*
It's actually closer to 65.
TheRostbart I didn't know either but did wonder absent mindedly why the Milky Way crosses our British skies the way it does. If we weren't tilted only the equatorial regions would get a decent view.
Thanks as always Brady! I would love to hear more about the distribution of the Messier objects; how is M53 so far off the galactic plane, is it still considered part of our galaxy?
Watched this video 6 years ago. But it's still as enjoyable today as then.
An extra thumbs up if I could.
5:36 Bigfoot!?
+muckerwood
We finally found him!
Nah, keep in mind that this is filmed in the UK, so it's probably just students on their way to the pub ;)
muckerwood Had to be.
How else would you expkain that bipedal creature?
Your videos are fantastic! Thank you, Brady!!
I know this is an old video... and my knowledge about these things it's close to 0.... but I found interesting that earth and the solar system rotate counterclockwise , and the galaxy rotates clockwise...
Is there a a "universe" predisposition for these movements? And If so, doesn't it mean that we are actually rotating "upside down" to the galaxy? :p
thanks
Old is another relative term that is mind boggling in the context of light years measurement.
what do you mean? earth and the solar system rotate clockwise, north and south doesn't exist.
2022 time flies
I do... because it's quite small I didn't put it on the list... but there are few more of them coming soon!
Love how the universe isn’t perfect but it is so freaking incredible and amazing!
I don't think we have mapped the orbits of our local group. Stars do move, but very slowly. It would take thousands of years for it to be visible to the naked eye. I remember reading once that the spiral arms of the galaxy are actually compression waves that move like ripples on a pond, where the galaxy is compressed it triggers new star formation there by making it brighter, and making it appear to be an arm of stars.
I was thinking how I would answer this question and I'm pleased to have thought of the same reasoning as the woman in the video; i.e finding out where Earth is in relation to the galactic plane and having the North pole point towards up/the top side of the Milky Way. Guess it's fortunate that the Earth or solar system is moving in such a way as to have had the north or south poles pointing towards to the centre.
I think in that case I would have, IMO, said the top side or up would depend on which pole pointed to the galactic centre, then looking from the outside of the galaxy in, past Earth which way made the Earth rotate clockwise, i.e if the North pole pointed towards the centre, west to east would be clockwise* and up/the top would be at 12, conversely if it was the south pole pointing to the centre, outside in, east to west would be clockwise* and again the topside of the galaxy would be at the 12 position.
Hopefully that doesn't only make sense to me!
That answers up in relation to our galaxy, but to answer which way is up in space?
To me, up would be a constantly changing direction away from points of mass; up would be the path of least gravitational resistance. Represented in 2D If you had lots of groups of people walking from A towards B behind you, that would represent down. Up would be the easiest path through the people to get you from B to A. Now expand in to 3D and extrapolate! Up would vary depending on your starting point within the solar system, galaxy or universe. Maybe if you started at each galactic core and headed for the nearest thing to open space taking the path of least gravitational resistance, i.e being at the centre of a clock* and there's a galaxy in each of the directions 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and no galaxy at 5, that way would be the start of your up (again extrapolate that idea in to 3D/spherical pov), and adjusting as necessary as you went to be on the path firthest from another galaxy. If you did this separately from each galaxy and mapped your course from each, then knowing where each galaxy was in relation to the others, looked at those maps and looked at correlations or averages, I guess you could come up with a potential direction for up?
NOW! Does that make sense to anyone else but me? I know it's a crazy (and I think fun#) idea with various problems, but then finding the direction of UP in space is a crazy question!
Anyone else have any equally good ideas for the theoretical up of space?
* hmm it seems I'm mentioning an abstract version of space-time! lol :D
#Hurray for Asperger's outside the box thinking!! :D
Now, how do we work out where the top of this box is?
Said box is interesting. Will it have a top and sides and bottom and thus have dimensions, yet contain inside it the infinite? expanse of the universe?
If we speculated that the cosmos both exists at astronomical scales and at quantum levels our universe could just be like one of two gluons or something equivalent to a quark and just be tiniest nano-particle? in a much larger frame of existence; our universe being just a unicellular part of a multicellular entity?
Now does this multicellular entity have access to said box with the universe..........
Send help, I'm lost, think I've caused myself a Mandlebrot fractalesque schizoid embellism; I've fallen without knowing which way is down!?! >XD
Gravity and rotation. What happens to a ball of pizza dough when you toss it up in the air spinning? Centrifugal force pulls on the ends, flattening it out into a disc. The farther away from the center, the faster you are moving just like the edge of a record moves faster than the center. The faster you move, the greater the centrifugal pull. The galaxy bulks up quite a bit towards the center and is less flat because it's rotation is not as fast because it's closer to the center.
Nothing wrong with being down.....you even call it down under where you come from right ?
I don't know why, and I'm not pretending or claiming t o be a genius, but this all seemed pretty self ex-planet-ory.
lol
I have the Cambridge Star Atlas and it explains much of this with great illustrations. I am a rooky astronomer and tools like this video are very helpful .
When we use cardinal points in space, we don't map it like a flat map as we do on Earth. Instead, we project a sphere outwards in space, with us in the center. If follows, as you sure realise, that the third dimension is simply the distance from the Earth. In light-years, parsecs or whatever...
Brilliant! Keep going, these videos are awesome!
This was really interesting and is excellent information, thank you
from what i know up is any direction going against the gravitational force and down is the same direction as the gravitational force. thats why i think there is no up and down in space, unless we choose a plain (our galaxy) to orient up and down
I guess that's what they tried to explain, but you shortened it to one sentence, well done 😅👍
I liked this video a lot. As someone ignorant in Astronomy it was very informative. A minor suggestion as you add other content to the Messier object videos would be to still talk about the object itself a bit more than this video. Maybe show more pictures or talk about how this globular cluster is different from other Messier globular clusters etc. Keep up with the interesting videos!
She didn't just reveal "another" bias, the only bias from the start was Dr. Gray's conception of north as "up" and "better." She apologized for astronomers aligning the north of the solar system with the north of the galaxy, but if the decision were made in the southern hemisphere, they still would have aligned south with south.
Up at 3am thinking, and decided to Google...Is there a sense of direction in space? Lol. I love the internet.
Lol same the thought of it just hit me 4am
it's like two weeks to a 10th anniversary of this vid publishing, which sounds like a proper time to ask about the man walkin' by at 5:37
well, glad you enjoyed it anyway... cheers for the comment
It's just so much fun to watch you two discuss these complicated matters! But I agree with other comments: Dr Gray was short of one hand to show all three axis (earth, solar system, galaxy) and a little drawing would have been helpful. Because now I am still wondering: What's the earth's axis in respect to the galaxy? If you add up "about 60°" and 23.5°, you might get close to 90° and all the "up or down"-discussion starts again 🤣!
Enjoyed this. Thanks. One production note - you might consider chilling on the constant zooms and adjustments even when the speaker is just talking to camera. Tends to distract. Of course just my opinion.
The bit where she says about the northern hemisphere bias of the IAU here on Earth made me think there must be some other IAUs on some other planets who've all made conflicting decisions.
It just seemed obvious that that was what has happened...taking for granted life on other planets.
Thanks again for these great videos!
i know im asking randomly but does anyone know a trick to log back into an Instagram account?
I stupidly lost my password. I would appreciate any help you can offer me.
@Pierce Alec instablaster =)
@Rene Dominic i really appreciate your reply. I got to the site through google and I'm trying it out atm.
Looks like it's gonna take a while so I will get back to you later with my results.
@Rene Dominic It did the trick and I now got access to my account again. Im so happy!
Thanks so much you really help me out :D
@Pierce Alec You are welcome :D
8 minute long video basically saying "because we decided that this shall be up."
I'm not an astronomer. But I think it's the same reason our solar system is mostly flat. When clouds of gas and dust coalesce into suns and planets it sets off a chain of events and begins to rotate. As the new suns and planets accrete mass this rotation becomes stronger as they pull matter in thx to gravity. Rotational forces cause the objects to stretch out parallel to the plane of rotation. Think of spinning pizza dough. This rotation also stabilizes to some extent like a gyroscope.
What about other directions? Is there an East and West in the galaxy? Radial and anti-radial? What about in Earth orbit and the Solar system in general?
I'm really really glad that I asked that question in the other video.
It makes perfect sense to me now.
Thank You So Much :)
You had me at "uncharted backwater"
Great video. I'm now more confused than I've ever been. Appreciate it
See a list of other channels Brady works on in the video description...
Dr Gray has my exact eye color. It's a little un-nerving look into them.
She is very good at explaining stuff.
glad to hear that!
She said the tilt between the Celestial Equator and the Galactic Plane is about 60º. So, as the Earth is ~23º tilted to the Ecliptic, which is the tilt related to the Ecliptic and the Galatic plane? Is it 37º or 83º?
Thanks
it could also be any number between 37 and 83
It probably precesses between the two. No?
This got me thinking, so I build a very crude Illustrator diagram. I'll include an imgur link at the end. The plane of the solar system (ecliptic) is 60 degrees inclined in respect to the plane of the Milky Way, and the equatorial plane is 23 degrees inclined to the ecliptic, thus the actual angle of separation between the equatorial plane and the galactic varies between 83 and 37 degrees. It varies because the orientation of Earth's axis precesses every 26,000 years (the orientation of Earth's N pole moves around in a circle). I'm also assuming that the Solar System also precesses about its axis, although that would not change the angle with respect to Earth. Another phenomenon that can influence this angle is Earth's axial tilt or obliquity. As mentioned earlier, Earth's rotational axis is currently 23 degrees offset from the ecliptic pole, but this number also changes. Every 40,000 years, this 23 degree tilt can change from roughly 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees.
Here's a link to my crappy drawing. Hopefully you can decipher it. The lower image is a magnified image of the solar system and celestial planes. imgur.com/a/th0Pt
The center is absolutely brighter than our sun. The reason why we can be smack in the middle of a galaxy, and look up and not see that galaxy all over the sky is a combination of light pollution, the galaxy being very diffuse, and a galaxy's worth of dust clouds, debris, and gas blocking our view of the center. The best we get here on earth is under dark skies you can see the milky way, which IS our galaxy as seen from this spiral arm.
My brain just exploded! 😨
I like how Dr. Gray sneaks in Douglas Adams references.
So it was defined that way; there's no impericall, intrinsic up and down in space. This is a matter of speaking with a common reference point so everyone knows what direction you are looking when you say "up" in space. If you're traveling on an intergalactic starship with current technology up would feel like towards the center of the spinning wheel that you're on.
Loving this series keep it going :)
I've always wondered,where are telescopes and probes sent? Up,down?
Dr Meghan Gray is a great representative from Canada. Thanks Brady for all your videos from the land of the Great White North.
5:05 That answers my question. Thanks so much! 👍👍
That's actually pretty confusing, IMHO. I'd have defined "up" ("north") of any celestial object as the direction you have to look from so the object will rotate counter clockwise (ccw because for the Earth it has been used like that for a very long time).
Really interesting. I had not considered many of these facts.
So I guess the next question would be is there a Universe north? And how is that aligned with respect to our galaxy?
So, the sun rolls around the center of the galaxy on it's side, much like Uranus does around the Sun. That is a fascinating coincidence.
The Solar system is considered rotating counter clockwise, and the galaxy is considered rotating clockwise? This is very inconsiderate of the IAU…
+henriok Agreed, I would have naively expected the right hand rule to determined which way was north/up for our galaxy. Apparently not.
Ath Athanasius Ah,... But would that be considered a right-handed bias? ;-)
Thank you, I looked at the comments to ask the question of which way the galaxy rotates. Seems I'd been assuming right-hand rule for years. Silly me.
I'm a Mars scientist and you should see the range of standards (an oxymoron) we have about latitude/longitudes on Mars. On Earth longitudes range from -180 (or 180 W) to +180 (or 180 E). On Mars we now typically use longitudes 0-360 E, but back in the Viking days people used 0-360 W (same prime meridian though). Some recent instruments still use west longitudes, so I've learned to "read" both systems. Since the laser altimeter (MOLA) mapped Mars and gave us our elevation base map, we've mostly switched to the 0-360 E system, because that's what MOLA used. But atmospheric modelers tend to use Earth-centric software to make their plots, so you often see Mars atmospheric maps with longitudes ranging from -180 to +180 - the modelers don't work with the data so much, so this doesn't bother them. But it jars the rest of us.
Now, if you go back to Mariner 9 (1971-1972), the prime meridian on Mars was on the opposite side of the planet (gah!).
So if the universe is flat how do you go up and down. I get that there's enough space to actually go up and down but what happens when you reach the end of that space? The impression that I get is that the universe is an infinite rectangle. So my question is what is above and below that rectangle and how wide is the rectangle?
that means if you are in deep space with no planets we use the hemispheres of our planet and coordinated positions of stars to determine what's "up" or "down. i personally thought space had no up or down or left or right without using our own planets perspective. i guess im not entirely incorrect.
Not to be pedantic, but she says it's free software, which it is not. Freeware and free software are two very distinct concepts, with freeware being a software that is supplied free of charge, but with a proprietary license. Free software is free of charge and is released with particular types of licenses such as BSD or GPL, where the source code is available for people to study and modify for their own purposes.
What I do not understand: Why do the stars in each globular cluster appear to be in a spherical distribution about the center of gravity of each cluster, and why don't all the stars of a globular cluster go crashing into the center of gravity of that cluster?
I have a giant nerd crush on Dr. Meghan Gray. My fav videos are the ones, like this, in which she stars....(pun intended). Put her in every video please!
Ok, but who determined North to be 'up'?
Celestia is a good one and free. If you want the telescope experience of looking at objects from earth then Stellarium is a great program as well and also free.
Up is just the opposite of Gravitys direction.
On earth the sky is up because it is away from the gravity.
If you were on mars, Up would still be away from the gravity of mars.
Since the universe has gravity, you could go so far as to say that up is outside the universe.
Its a context sensitive term and a human concept. Without it, explaining things would be very difficult.
I thought at one point astronomers thought our solar system was much closer to the "outside" of the milky way. Is this just a faulty memory or did our "positioning" get updated sometime in the past decade or two?
While standing upright in Canada or standing upright in Australia we are NOT "upside down" or "right side up". While in space there is literally and truly NO up or down. It's all a matter of perspective I would guess. Astronauts on the ISS discuss this topic quite often and they all say the same thing; "there is no 'up' or 'down' in a weightless environment"...
@Rex Irkalla to a degree everything in the universe is attracted to it. even you
Did you know that our solar system's position within the galaxy is one of the things that trigger those "Mandela effect" people? Apparently a bunch of them misremember hearing that we were at the far outer edge at some point, so when they actually research it and find the actual answer, they freak out.
The core is full of stars, with a supermassive black hole in the centre.
thanks... they're fun to make.
Is M53 red shifted I wonder? Is it some cluster that got flung out of our galaxy, or is it an incoming cluster that is blue shifted and will collide with the spiral arms?
Imagine being one of those people at a party who asks Meghan what she does, hope someone once said in response, oh! I'm a Sagittarius.
The earth flat
Ok, just throwing this out there. Say a group of astronauts blasted off from Earth’s North Pole at the exact same time as a group at the South Pole. Given Earth’s positioning, wouldn’t one be going “up” while the other went “down” (theoretically)? Would their views of the cosmos be different? I pose this question with the full disclose that I’m utterly confused by spacial positioning in the universe.
I always get creeped out when I really think about how everything is.
Frightening at times. I think too much.
How do we know what our galaxy looks like if nothing's ever left it? the furthest we've reached so far is only JUST out side of the solar system.
Well in space, I would imagine nothing is up or down....just up or down relative to a fixed object.....right?
I like how she says we are in an "uncharted backwater" but from our point of view, we are in the most-charted backwater :)
It is a sneaky Douglas Adams / Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) reference - 1st paragraph introduction to the story. We find ourselves in...
Definitions are fun! 😃
I'm well aware of various coordinate systems for mapping earth using GIS (Geographic Information System) software. These different projections take into account that the earth isn't exactly a sphere. Is there anything equivalent in the galactic coordinate system? Any kind of aberrations in shape? Very interesting video!
When talking about our solar system, we always show planets on a 2d plain.
I've always wondered what would happen if you go "up" or "down" in relation to the planets in our solar system.
That's what Pluto dared to do ... and you know what happened 😱🤣🤩
using the right hand rule would seem intuitive to define all these coordinates.
"Underneath" our galaxy is not a correct wording. It should be "northwards" or something. In the galactic plane "north" is in direction towards the northern part of Coma Berenices, and M53 is in Coma Berenices.
I believe the answer to your first question is no, the oort cloud doesn't extend out that far, with respect to the distances to other star systems. ...If edges of star systems could overlap, I believe they would be gravitationally bound and they would be consider 1 big star system. I believe the answer to your last question is also a no, for a star to get that close to capture pluto, would require a capture of our sun (gravitationally speaking), along with the rest of our solar system.
Aren't Aussies all from "the land down under (Where women glow and men plunder?)"? but I digress. This suggests that the land of plenty is down and north is up.
Hold up, I don't know if this is a dumb question but I thought all stars existed in galaxies, I don't understand how globular clusters can be outside our galaxy? If some one could explain it would be much appreciated, Thanks
As I understand (I am not an astrophysicist) they are outside the galactic plane, but still gravitationally bound to the galaxy. On the other hand: I'm not sure couldn't there be stars between the galaxies? There are "Rogue-planets" too ...
Who decided up is better than down?
The more I learn about astronomy, the more I think our view as kids, to compare atoms to the solar system was correct.
Dr Grey is on top of things 🙂
Soooo with the James Web Telescope we can now see beyond the centre of the Milky way right..?
If the side view of the galaxy shows north, south, east and west what does the face view show? How do we determine direction on that plane?