Sunday, March 05, 2006
The Swift-Boating of Andromeda Galaxy
This seemingly unending string of attacks against Andromeda Galaxy by your puny human scientists can only be a Karl Rove-inspired hatchet job. First, it was adding stars to the Milky Way's total, and then it was adding dark matter to claim the Milky Way is more massive than Andromeda.
Now, your tiny human brains have conceived the notion that Andromeda's stellar halo is metal-poor. Yes, it's true the Milky Way's stellar halo has long been known to be metal-poor, but why must you drag the bling-blingiest galaxy down to your level? The principal author attempts to get back on our good side by populating his web pages with admissions that the Andromeda Galaxy is "magnificent," but we cannot ignore his attempts to deny Andromeda's metal-richness by velocity-windowing out the metal-rich components, and then explaining away metal-rich halo fields which remain ("This substructure is likely to be associated with the giant southern stream").
All this effort is only necessary in order to support the Cold Dark Matter paradigm. So once again "dark matter" makes its invisible appearance.
Now, your tiny human brains have conceived the notion that Andromeda's stellar halo is metal-poor. Yes, it's true the Milky Way's stellar halo has long been known to be metal-poor, but why must you drag the bling-blingiest galaxy down to your level? The principal author attempts to get back on our good side by populating his web pages with admissions that the Andromeda Galaxy is "magnificent," but we cannot ignore his attempts to deny Andromeda's metal-richness by velocity-windowing out the metal-rich components, and then explaining away metal-rich halo fields which remain ("This substructure is likely to be associated with the giant southern stream").
All this effort is only necessary in order to support the Cold Dark Matter paradigm. So once again "dark matter" makes its invisible appearance.
