The Arp 84 pair of galaxies
Ever wonder what science teachers do in their spare time?
Get a master’s degree, what else? As part of my penultimate semester at Swinburne University’s Swinburne Astronomy Online, I took a course on computational astrophysics where I was able to tie my astrophotography hobby into the investigation of galaxy mergers.
Using the University’s Galaxy Interactions simulator (running on a supercomputer in Australia) I made over 100 simulations to try and figure out how an interesting pair of galaxies, Arp 84, got to look the way they do now.
I used an image that I took of the pair last winter as the reference to work towards. The image is the result of more than 4 hours of open shutter time and is shown on the right. A movie of the final simulation is below.
That’s what we science teachers do with our spare time!
A movie of the simulation of Arp 84
