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Rings in Spiral Galaxies in the Local Group: Lessons from René Magritte

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Lessons from the Local Group

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Abstract

In this review, I wish to focus on the veritable goldmine of lessons one can glean from The Local Group. By way of a prelude, I wish to highlight the treachery of photographic or digital images of galaxies, by introducing the work of the Belgian surreal artist René Magritte. We discuss his famous painting “The Treachery of Images” (La trahison des images, 1928), which portrays a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted these words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (‘This is not a pipe’). The painting is not a physical pipe, but rather a representation of a pipe. And so it is with galaxies in the Local Group and their masks: what we see is only a representation of what actually is. The definition of a galaxy given in the Hubble Atlas beautifully portrays the treachery of photographic images of galaxies, being then defined as closed dynamical systems, or island universes. We conclude with “perspective”, not only in the world of astrophysics, but in our human condition as well.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    David L. Block

Authors
  1. David L. Block
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Correspondence to David L. Block .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Kenneth Freeman

  2. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

    Bruce Elmegreen

  3. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    David Block

  4. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Matthew Woolway

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Block, D. (2015). Rings in Spiral Galaxies in the Local Group: Lessons from René Magritte. In: Freeman, K., Elmegreen, B., Block, D., Woolway, M. (eds) Lessons from the Local Group. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10614-4_35

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