Jessamyn Fairfield
speaker
401 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 30 Aug
Jessamyn Fairfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
What if they live on the surface, Shane?
That's right.
Tricky topics on Earth.
Let's go back to space.
This is a new study that just came out of Durham University about the Milky Way and the fact that about 10 billion years ago, we think that it flipped on its side as a result of a head-on collision with another galaxy.
To me, this is both really cool to think about, but it also it's kind of a detective story almost because these researchers were looking at
Stars in the Milky Way, and you know, the Milky Way is kind of this flat disc, the galaxy that we're in, we can kind of see the band of it across the sky because we're sitting at a point in the disc, but it also has this halo of stars that go all around it in kind of a sphere.
And what the researchers noticed and were puzzled by is the fact that the stars in the halo of the Milky Way were orbiting the center much more slowly than stars in the disc.
So stars in the disk were going about 10 times faster as they went around the center of the Milky Way compared to these ones in the sort of spherical halo.
And that didn't really make a lot of sense unless you thought about some other set of stars coming in and interacting with the Milky Way at some point in the past.
And so this team from Durham did a bunch of simulations to find that actually if you had a Milky Way-like galaxy and you had another much smaller galaxy kind of come in in a head-on collision and effectively over millions of years get like absorbed into it gravitationally, you could end up with a situation like this where you have this sort of cloud of slower stars orbiting around the center of this sort of disk of much faster moving stars.
But one of the things that this would mean is that the entire disk would sort of flip onto its side by about 90 degrees.
So go from lying flat to like standing straight up in space, which is kind of crazy to think about.
And it also probably contributed to creating the like the bulge in the middle of the Milky Way, which we can see, you know, if you ever have been somewhere really, really dark and you can see the shape of the galaxy in the sky at night, which is very cool.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
But it's rotating.
Well, think of it like you're in a swimming pool.
You can have something that's oriented horizontally.
You can have something that's oriented vertically.
Neither one is standing, I suppose, technically, but they're both floating at different angles with respect to each other.
Showing 121–140 of 401 · page 7 of 21
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