Tuesday’s Quiz: Celestial or Cellular? Hosted by the American Association of Cell Biology (ASCB), today’s mystery pix are Google Circle Blues. Decide if each image is from the heavens or from the cell.
Cast your vote here: http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=26228
Answers at midnight!
madame scientist's not-so-mad musings 
Left is a cell, right is celestial… Pretty sure…
My guess is that the one on the right is cellular. It is too regular to be celestial..could be an electron micrograph of a nuclear pore. e.g, look at the middle image on this page: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/membranes/
As for the one on the left..it has such a distinct boundary..like that of a cell. Could be an actin stain. But where’s the black hole of the nucleus? Tricky!! I’m going out on a limb and guessing celestial 🙂
I agree with Sami and I study Microbiology (Cell Biology) :p
Well… the one on the left is so uniform, it seems to be a singular body, that’s why I think cell. The one on the right is misty, cloud-like… that’s why I’m thinking celestial. ^_^
I wasn’t able to guess any of them, but google finds the right one. Maybe one should crop them (e.g. to the lower right quadrant) to foil the image search.
Rajini Rao There is a lot of regular stuff in the sky. The class of things in the right picture tends to be regular rather often.
Sami Smile Are you sure we all see the same picture? To me the right one (the bright violet Q) looks cloudy and the left one (blue disk with a sharp boundary) looks like a singular thing (with a membrane).
Haha, Ralf Muschall used a Google image search! I’m guessing you are telling us that left is cellular and right is celestial? Interesting that the quiz masters did not crop the image today…they did yesterday, and that made it much harder to detect. So what’s the celestial object on the right?
Ralf Muschall I obviously don’t know my left from right… But that’s what I meants. Left = Cell, Right = celestial body.
Rajini Rao Google did not find the left one, and I don’t know. Shall I really reveal the right one? The quiz is not over yet, and I would prefer not to spoil it for the rest of the world (midnight EST is sometime tomorrow here). I can’t read the minds of the makers of the quiz, but if I were in their place, the probablity of the left being cellular would always being 50% independently of the right one (IOW, the top four answer options would be correct with 25% probability each).
Since the cat is out of the bag, here is the description for the image on the right:”Description: E0102-72 is a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Located in the constellation Tucana, this galaxy is 190,000 light years from Earth. The remnant is approximately a thousand years old. Stretching across forty light years of space, the expanding multimillion degree shell of gas resembles a flaming cosmic wheel.”
Wow. I still think there is a resemblance to an electron micrograph of a nuclear pore. EM images can be quite fuzzy depending on their resolution and how they’ve been processed/averaged. The nuclear pore has a spoke and wheel look as in the link I posted a few comments above.
Image on left is still a mystery.
From what I know of cells, it’s some ind of anima cell. That’s all I can tell you from my limited high school science class.
Too late, Ralf Muschall , if you can google it so can I (or anyone else)! 🙂
Left looks like it has openings in the membrane. If it is a cell it should be dead. On the other hand if it is a blue star then these openings look like sun storms and the dark spots are like sun spots. I would vote for blue disk as a celestial body.
You’ve convinced me, Jatin Lodhia . Also, any stain of the cell should show a large empty region for the nucleus. So the best guess so far is both celestial (until someone convinces us otherwise).
I voted the left one Cellular and the right one Celestial. Then I did a Google image search the right one is definitely Celestial. http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/snrg/ but the left one it could go either way, if the left image is cropped then it is hard to guess.
ANSWER We got it sort of correct by collective effort. Both images are celestial . On the left is “the gorgeously intriguing Tycho supernova remnant; please follow the source link for more information and images.” On the right is the “mellifluously-named E0102-72, a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
Source: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2011/tycho/more.html
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/snrg/
Celestial R?