Mixed Media

12 x 12 x 11/16 in. (30.5 × 30.5 × 1.8 cm)

Sold in a 13” x 13” brown wood grain floating frame.

The barred spiral galaxy NGC 3887, lies over 60 million light-years away from us in the southern constellation of Crater (the Cup). The very existence of spiral arms was for a long time a problem for astronomers. The arms emanate from a spinning core and should therefore become wound up ever more tightly, causing them to eventually disappear after a (cosmologically) short amount of time. It was only in the 1960s that astronomers came up with the solution to this winding problem; rather than behaving like rigid structures, spiral arms are in fact areas of greater density in a galaxy’s disk, with dynamics similar to those of a traffic jam. The density of cars moving through a traffic jam increases at the center of the jam, where they move more slowly. Spiral arms function in a similar way; as gas and dust move through the density waves, they become compressed and linger before moving out of them again.