BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Cosmic Father's Day *new article*

What sort of tie would you give a cosmic father? What would you feed him? Where might he find challenging mountaineering, make an astounding golf shot or get up an interstellar soccer game? How can you send a special man a genuinely galactic greeting? Here's how.

Cosmic Father's Day

"World's Greatest Dad" - or maybe "World's Best Dad" if there's not much space - seems to find its way onto mugs, shirts, cards and whatever. Here it is written in galaxies. All of the "letters" in the message are galaxies found in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which was classified by the citizen science volunteers of Galaxy Zoo.

You can do it too, and it doesn't just have to be for Father's Day. If you put in your message and hit "galactify" you get it in galaxies. You can also have as many tries as you want of the same message, as sometimes some of the "letters" are a bit wonky.

You can send a link to your message by email, tweet it or put in on Facebook.

Ties and Father's Day. Do they go together like peanut butter and jam? This cartoon suggests possibly not.

Even if - unlikely though it is - Dad didn't want another tie, surely he wouldn't object to this one, the Bow Tie Nebula (PGC 3074547).

The nebula is definitely not a place where the summer heat would get you down. In our understanding of heat energy, absolute zero (-273.15°C or -459.67°F) is the coldest temperature. Interestingly, earlier this week MIT researchers cooled a molecule to within a teensy fraction of absolute zero.

But even without any help from MIT the Bow Tie Nebula is scarcely 1°C above absolute zero.

Winter vacation anyone?

The Crab Nebula (M1) is the remnant of a supernova that was first observed by Chinese astronomers in 1054. William Parsons (Lord Rosse) drew what he saw through his 36-inch telescope, and thought it looked like a crab. This is how the nebula got its name. It's in the constellation Taurus, not Cancer the Crab.

Personally, given that drawing, I'd have named it the Pineapple Nebula. What about you?

Here is a picture of the Lobster Nebula (NGC 6357) which I mentioned in the article. I think you can see how it got its nickname.