{"id":91,"date":"2007-10-31T00:19:17","date_gmt":"2007-10-31T05:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2007-10-31T00:20:36","modified_gmt":"2007-10-31T05:20:36","slug":"the-galactic-foxtrot-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=91","title":{"rendered":"The galactic foxtrot revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A coupla months back, Michael &#8220;Bongo&#8221; Longo at the University of Michigan announced that he&#8217;d been a-starin&#8217; and a-studyin&#8217; some 200,000 elliptical galaxies up there in the heavens and had noticed something strange about &#8217;em: they is all pointing in the same direction.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=27\">The physics arXiv blog dutifully reported the story<\/a> but it now turns out Bongo Longo has now withdrawn the paper sayin&#8217;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to the discovery of a serious bias resulting from the systematic dimming of galaxies with larger ellipticities away from the North Galactic Pole. Thus the conclusion that there is a special axis along which the elliptical galaxies tend to be aligned is incorrect.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Shame really. I know ya&#8217;ll wanted to know what they were pointing at.<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0708.4013\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0708.4013<\/a>: The Axis of Opportunity: The Large-Scale Correlation of Elliptical Galaxies<\/p>\n<p>(Thanks <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fungible.com\/\">Tim<\/a>, &#8216;ppreciate it)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A coupla months back, Michael &#8220;Bongo&#8221; Longo at the University of Michigan announced that he&#8217;d been a-starin&#8217; and a-studyin&#8217; some 200,000 elliptical galaxies up there in the heavens and had noticed something strange about &#8217;em: they is all pointing in the same direction. The physics arXiv blog dutifully reported the story but it now turns [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hellraisin","category-stars-in-their-eyes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}