Try It
Now that you have seen a model of how to closely analyze the article for translation between qualitative, quantitative and visual information, it is time for you to practice analyzing for these types of information.
Read the excerpt below from the "An Active And Bright Galaxy." section of the "Astronomers discover an active, bright galaxy ‘in its infancy'"opens in new window article. View the photograph of galaxy EGS-zs8-1.
As you read, analyze for and take notes about the following:
- Information about galaxies and how scientists observe them
- Which information is qualitative
- Which information is quantitative
- How the photograph represents the information presented in the excerpt
Stronger telescopes may allow scientists to discover even more galaxies in space.
4 Capturing an image from a far-off light source is like looking back in time. When we look at the sun, we are seeing a snapshot of what it looked like eight minutes ago. The same principle applies for the light coming from the galaxy known as EGS-zs8-1. The major difference is that our snapshot of this distant galaxy is extremely old — roughly 13.1 billion years old.
5 EGS-zs8-1 is so far away that the light coming from it is extremely faint. And yet, compared with other distant galaxies, it is surprisingly active and bright at the time we see it, forming stars at roughly 80 times the rate the Milky Way does today. This advanced galaxy had built up about 8 billion suns’ worth of mass. That's more than 15 percent of the mass of the Milky Way, even though, as it appears to astronomers, it had been around for just a few hundred million years — a mere fraction of the Milky Way’s more than 13 billion years in business.
6 "If it was a galaxy near the Milky Way (today), it would be this vivid blue color, just because it’s forming so many stars," Illingworth said.”
– Newselaopens in new window, May 18, 2015
After you finish reading and analyzing, answer the following questions with well-organized written responses, using evidence from the excerpt.
