TAKEPLACE: STELLAR STREAMS AND REMNANTS OF SATELLITE GALAXIES

Saturday, February 12, 2011

STELLAR STREAMS AND REMNANTS OF SATELLITE GALAXIES

A new stream of stars has been found running through the constellation Aquarius, and astronomers think the group is all that's left of a smaller galaxy that was recently gobbled up by our home galaxy.

The Milky Way hosts more than a dozen known stellar streams, the remnants of satellite galaxies that were gravitationally torn apart and consumed. Most of the other streams loop around the plane of our disk-shaped galaxy, like octopus tentacles grasping a dinner plate. NG

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TakePlace was made with you in mind It's about ideas and innovation, creative perspectives, and solutions. We're advocates for change, because change needs friends. We explore complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).