| Description: | Bluebottles (a.k.a. Blueys, or "Portuguese man-of-war") are among the weirdest creatures you can find on our planet. They are actually not single animals but colonies of various types of things called "zoids" (so named because they come from the planet Zoid, or at least that is what they look like). You can find them in tropical waters e.g. in North Australia, but you should stay far away from them. When you spot one, you see of a small (15 cm) blue something floating in the water. The danger, however, is hidden from view, underwater where there are long tentacles of up to tens of meters long. These tentacles contain a poison that, when brought into contact with the skin, causes the most excruciating pain. For a picture see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man-of-war .
The picture here shows the cosmic version of a Bluebottle: the galaxy IC 10, a most unusual object, as if from another universe. On optical pictures, it is a small, inconspicuous galaxy (the orange bit in the middle), not too distant from our sister galaxy the Andromeda nebula. However, when you use the WSRT to have a look at the hydrogen gas, you discover that it has several large tentacles (the blue stuff), stretching far beyond the optical galaxy. We don't quite know yet why IC 10 is the way it is. Most likely, the small optical galaxy has caught, in typical Bluebottle way, some innocent gas clouds into its gravitational traps and is now angling them in in order to devour them. Or perhaps also here the people from Zoid have something to do with it... |
