Great article! Our galaxy is far bigger, brighter and more massive than most others, Via Scientific American
To see how the Milky Way fits into the broad spectrum of galaxies, astronomers must survey all the types of galaxies that exist, from bright to dim. That’s most easily accomplished by looking closest to our own, where we can detect even the dimmest and most feeble of galaxies. In recent years, that search has yielded an explosion in the number of known galaxies nearby.
A clearer picture of our galactic neighbors began to emerge back in 1938, when Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley inadvertently took the first step toward demolishing the notion that the Milky Way is an average galaxy. While looking at a photographic plate of the obscure southern constellation Sculptor, he noticed a faint smudge. Just a fingerprint or some other defect, he thought—until a second photographic plate of the same constellation showed the same smudge. Soon after, he found another smudge in the neighboring constellation of Fornax.
The smudges in Sculptor and Fornax were galaxies of a new type: ghostly ones that astronomers now call dwarf spheroidals. Dim and diffuse, with their stars spread out from one another, they don’t exactly beckon through a telescope. Both are among our closest galactic neighbors—so close, in fact, that they orbit the Milky Way, just as moons orbit a planet, making them satellite galaxies of our own. The Sculptor Dwarf Spheroidal is 280,000 light-years from Earth, and the Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal is 455,000 light-years away. And they are dim. Whereas the Milky Way emits 30 billion times as much light as the sun, Sculptor produces just 1.8 million solar luminosities and Fornax just 19 million.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Select Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: PyCon AU 2024 Talks, New Raspberry Pi Gear Available and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
