and Lyman Spitzer had proposed the theory, but Rudolph Minkowski, a colleague and respected member of the astronomy community, publicly declaimed it.
Baade bet Minkowski $1,000 that Cygnus A was a colliding galaxy, and although Minkowski insisted on lowering the stakes to a bottle of whiskey, he accepted the wager. Several months later, with spectroscopic observations pointing to a collision, Minkowski asked Baade, ΓÇ£What brand?ΓÇ¥ Minkowski gave a small bottle, which he himself drank the next time he visited BaadeΓÇÖs house. The passage of time has justified MinkowskiΓÇÖs ΓÇ£reclaimingΓÇ¥ his whiskey: Cygnus A is, in fact, not a merging galaxy but a single one bisected by a dust lane. Even so, evidence for other
