Photo credit: NASA/ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Loyal followers of WMFC know that I define "Art" broadly----here is a recently released photograph of a lovely intergalatic soap bubble. It is, in fact, the glowing hydrogen remnants of a violent supernova explosion that sent out a shock wave that is traveling at more than 18 million kilometers per hour through space. Luckily it won't get to us for awhile, still being about 160,000 light-years away. The shock wave bubble is currently 23 light-years across.
And just to make this a completely sciency post, here is a "map" of all the different kinds of bacteria that are in five specific parts of our body (I'm talking gals here and you must click to enlarge). Each end of a branch, of which there are hundreds if not thousands, represents a specific species of bacteria. While we go through our lives generally thinking of bacteria as bad, most are in fact living in a happy symbiotic relationship with us. So pretty and lovely to think of my mouth as the human equivalent of the Amazon rain forest...but I think someone (Anne?) could put a more aesthetically pleasing "body" in the middle! Challenge on the table!
(full article was published by Lee and Mazmanian in the journal Science, Vol. 330
no. 6012
pp.
1768-1773, 2010.)
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