The Tangled Bank just got a great review in CBE-Life Sciences Education, a journal from the American Society for Cell Biology about teaching science. Scientific journals roll out their reviews a lot more slowly than newspapers and magazines, but in this case, it was worth the wait. Randy Moore, a University of Minnesota biologist who has done great work in defense of the teaching of evolution, leaves me trying to decide which line I want to drop, blurb-like, onto my web site…

“The best textbook I’ve seen for a nonmajors introductory biology course about evolution.”

…or maybe–

“The Tangled Bank is well-produced, up-to-date, readable, and exceptionally well illustrated. At no point does it falter.”

or maybe the last line of the review…

“Read The Tangled Bank. You won’t be disappointed.”

Thanks for the embarrassment of riches.

Do cannibals have friends? I imagine some must… unless they have them over for dinner.

Just like the giant elliptical galaxy ESO 306-17, which you can see in this gorgeous Hubble picture:

[Click to embiggen, or grab the monster 3800 x 3800 pixel version. They have wallpapers, too.]

ESO 306-17 sits about a billion light years from Earth. In this picture it looks like it’s surrounded by other galaxies, but that’s an illusion: all the other galaxies you see here are either much closer to us or much farther away. ESO 306-17 is actually a loner, sitting all by itself in space.[Update: Or almost all alone; Michael West, who led the team that took these images, tells me the little elliptical at the bottom left of ESO 306-17 may be interacting with it. It's difficult to tell; but what is certain is that there are very few galaxies near the big one, far fewer than you'd expect.]

How can a galaxy get this big and yet be sitting in a giant void? Easy. It ate all the neighbors. We know this is how galaxies grow in size, and is even why the Milky Way is a giant among galaxies. Like our galaxy, ESO 306-17 has a lot of globular clusters around it, just as you’d expect if it ate a bunch of other galaxies.

When I downloaded the bigger image, I noticed this weird galaxy on the left:

Wow. I’m guessing that long stretched-out junk is a small galaxy that got shredded, maybe after a close pass to that spiral. I thought for a moment the spiral might be active — that is, the black hole in its core was actively eating matter and ejecting long jets of gas and light — but the core itself is not bright, as you’d expect. Plus, the material is lumpy and irregular, more indicative of a cosmic collision in progress. It’s unrelated to the elliptical, but still very cool.

I really urge you to download the big image and take a nice, long look at it. There’s a lot to see, and it’s all really beautiful.

Image credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO)