(draft script)

Title: The Bubba Gump Galaxy Company
Castdate: 060123
Written By: Aaron


Pamela: Welcome to another episode of Slacker Astronomy. Each week we bring you a recent news event from the world of astronomy. And when there is nothing to report we'll play scenes from our upcoming musical, "March of the Astronomers". 
	(Deep, serious narrator voice)
Travis:	Penguins aren't the only things living in the middle of antartica. Astronomers use it to study the sky in infrared and other wavelengths that require dry air.
Pamela:	Which is yet another reason why there are more radio astronomers than infrared astronomers, for radio can be done in the warm tropics. 
Travis:	Let's see, a choice between the arecibo radio telescope in puerto rico or the  Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station...

	(cue Green stars, sung to the tune of Green Acres)
Pamela:	Antartica is the place for me. I get sunburned in the sea. I just adore the aurorae view. Keep the tropics and send me to the frozen blue.
Travis:	Puerto Rico is where I'd rather stay. Beach volleyball I like to play. Polka dot bikini's so far and wide. Keep your penguins and send me a mai tai. 
Pamela: The snow men!
Travis:	Sand castles!	
Pamela:	Frosbite!
Travis:	Mosquito Bites!
Pamela: You are an astronomer...
Travis:	I'll go where the NSF sends me!
Pamela:	Grant committees, we are yours!
	(applause?)

Pamela:	How's that take, Aaron?
Aaron:	Terrific. Stick with me, I'll make you a star.
Pamela:	You'll fuse us into helium?
Travis:	I think he means Hollywood stars.
Aaron:	Woah, don't get delusions of grandeur here. I think Bollywood is more realistic.
Travis:	What is Bollywood?
Pamela:	Bollywood is like the elephant in the room of hollywood. It's the Indian cinema which is larger and sells more tickets than Hollywood films. Yet no one ever talks about it.
Travis:	That's a little bit like our subject today. Astronomers have found a new nearby galaxy. It is so large and wide that no one has noticed it before, even though it is the closest galaxy to us.
Pamela:	It was discovered by sifting through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS for short. The SDSS's goal is to map a quarter of the sky with  a 2.5 meter telescope. The telescope uses a variety of color filters to take images along with another instrument that takes spectra. 
Travis:	Astronomers are using the data to map a section our local universe, including over a million galaxies and quasars. The project began in 1998 and is funded through 2008. The data is released to the public incrementally as it goes along.
Pamela:	Because the observations are made in many colors, astronomers can determine the distance to them. When we know the color of a star and it's brightness as seen from Earth, it is a pretty simple algebra problem to determine its distance.
Travis:	For this particular research, astronomers made a database of all 48 million stars in the SDSS survey. They plotted the stars along the galactic plane and found that they were symetrical. This was expected since we are looking at our galaxy edge on. So half the stars will be above the edge, and the other half below.
Pamela:	Then they started filtering out stars based on their distance from Earth. First they removed the stars within 1,000 light years. Then stars within 2,000 light years, then 5,000, 10,000...
Travis:	As they peeled away at the layers of our galaxy they found that the distribution of stars in the sky slowly became less and less symetrical.
Pamela:	Finally, when they reached 25-30,000 light years the sky wasn't symetrical at all. In fact, there was that white elephant we had been looking at all along.
Travis:	A new galaxy was there in all its glory. Centered on the constellation Virgo, it covers about 1,000 square degress on the sky, which is about 5,000 times the width of the full Moon.
Pamela:	Interestingly, there was a friendly debate at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society about whether to say it is in the sky or on the sky. The on the sky camp won and that was used in the press conference announcing the discovery.
Travis:	I guess it makes sense, if you consider the sky being defined as within the Earth's atmosphere.
Pamela:	But what about Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds?  It clearly states that Lucy has the sun in her eyes, and the Sun is definitely outside of the atmosphere.
Travis:	So according to the Holy Book of the Beatles, the sky extends beyond the atmosphere.
Pamela:	Yes, so this new galaxy should be *in* the sky.
Travis:	In or on, tomato or tomahto.
Pamela:	A galaxy by any other name would be just as cool. This one, by the way, will probably be called Virgo since it is in the Virgo constellation.
Travis:	We don't know how far back the new galaxy goes as the researchers have yet to find the stars residing on the other side. But they do estimate it has a little more than a million stars, about one two hundred thousadnths the size of the Milky Way. 
Pamela:	Perhaps we should name it Shrimp.
Travis:	Not quite. It is actually the largest structure currently seen from Earth - other than our own milky way, taking up a fifth of the sky and is perpendicular to the plane of our galaxy. So it is kind of diving into our disc. It is believed to be a dwarf galaxy in the process of merging with the Milky Way.
Pamela:	So our galaxy likes to eat shrimp.
Travis:	No, but its gravity likes to pull in other small nearby galaxies. This is the 12th dwarf galaxy so far discovered orbiting or merging with the Milky Way. Eventually they all will merge with us. Let's listen to a clip 
from the press conference announcing this discovery. The picture they refer to is included in the mp3 album art work
and also available at slackerastronomy.org.
	(clip - mp3 from 15:45 - 16:43)
Pamela:	The principal author of the discovery paper is Mario Juric, a graduate student at Princeton. His work builds on that of a Yale graduate student who in 2001 suggested the existence of this galaxy. Kathy Vivas, who now works as an astronomer in Venezuela, discovered a clump of a particular class of variable stars. But they were in anm unexpected spot and she reasoned that they may be part of a dwarf galaxy.
Travis:	Kudos to the authors of the discovery's press release for quoting her and giving her credit. This is a great example about how science works. Discoveries are built on top of each other. What you may think is a ho hum result today, could be part of a grand discovery tomorrow.
Pamela:	It's a little like how new TV shows work. The pilots are almost always awful, but you have to try to identify the morsels of talent in them to decide which ones to keep watching.
Travis:	Or do what I do and never watch TV. 
Pamela:	How do you get all our Simpsons and sci-fi references then?
Travis:	News flash for you: NO ONE gets the references!
Pamela:	As always, more information is available in the show notes at slackerastronomy.org. We also have embedded pictures into the album art of this podcast. 
Travis:	We apologise to Vic Mizzy for massacring his Green Acres lyrics.
Pamela:	We do?
Travis:	Yes, we do.
Pamela:	Okay, sorry Vic.
Travis:	And remember to subscribe to our SA Extra Feed. We have new chit chat shows available and and tons of podcasts from the AAS meeting, including a recording of the address by Michael Griffin, the new administrator of NASA. He talks about the Hubble, astronomy, the role of education at NASA and much more.
Pamela: I'm Pamela for Travis and our author Aaron, thanks for listening.
Travis: Clear skies and clear bandwidth. You've been listening to slacker astronomy, a podcast for you, for fun, for the voices in our heads.
        (oceanside clip)