Cosmic Hand

This awesome picture is just one of eight great astronomy pictures from NewScientist's gallery rounding up the best images released in commemoration of 100 Hours of Astronomy, an event celebrating the International Year of Astronomy.

Check out the rest of the images here.

Galaxies Spell Out Cosmic Warning/Apology!

From NewScientist:

Trolling through a physics preprint server today, a colleague of mine spotted several highly intriguing papers.

One (pdf), from a project called Galaxy Zoo that invites volunteers to analyse and categorise galaxies in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, reports on a strange new class of galaxy cluster (see images).

The team writes: "Upon detailed inspection, the morphologies of individual galaxies and close systems approximate the familiar geometric shapes of letters of the basic modern Latin alphabet. . . . the existence of these messages might indicate intelligent life beyond our own."

From the observed phrases ("Caution! Structure formation in progress", "Delays possible for 7 Gyr" and "We apologise for the inconvenience"), it's clear that these are cosmic road signs, and that the creator of the signs speaks the Queen's English (this I deduce both from the "s" in apologise and from the general politeness of the message).