Now, I know I should probably take this all a little more seriously, and I know that this picture…
…Can probably be filed safely under “artist’s impression”, but I cannot help but find it deeply cool that:
1) Black Holes fart hot gas, and
2) NASA has an observatory called “The Very Large Telescope”.
Bet their office Xmas party is just an absolute riot, don’t you?
Full story in a slightly more serious tone from the BBC.
LOL! Perhaps fundies would say it’s more of this “God’s ass” business…
The Very Large Telescope belongs to the European Southern Observatory. The NASA telescope mentioned in the piece is Chandra, a satellite telescope.
Cool pic! Astronomy is awesome.
Not so much VLT as BFT.
Did someone step on a duck? Hey, hey, pull my finger!
Having lived near NASA/Goddard in MD, I can state that their Xmas parties are in fact the talk of the town.
Names get better in particle physics: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has three big lasers named Godzilla, T-REX, and Chihuahua.
I’m just about a month and an half from retiring from NASA. Most of my career was spent on aviation research, but I have been involved with the KAO (Kuiper Airborne Observatory) and it’s successor SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Atmospheric Research)……….pretty cool stuff and a nice mix for me, airplanes with telescopes. I’m also an amateur astronomer.
The planets and universe has always be the coolest place my brain gets to go…… ;)
Reminds me of the Very Large Array. Anyway, genetics still has the best names out there, from the Cheap Date gene to the Sonic Hedgehog gene, it never ceases to amuse. There is a thread on the xkcd forums about this.
They had to name it “The Very Large Telescope” to distinguish it from “The Large Telescope.” That wasn’t a joke.
I am reminded of a classic photograph of a man sneezing. The background is black and the sneeze is backlit so that a glistening mist is seen. The photo was captioned “God creating the Universe”.
I wish this had come just a day after “Moses and God’s Ass”.