Chinahand Posted January 17, 2014 Author Share Posted January 17, 2014 (edited) Thought I'd post something about the scale of the Milky Way Galaxy - the collection of multiple hundred billions of stars, black holes, neutron stars, planets etc around whose collective centre of gravity our solar system is orbiting. It's big - about 100,000 light years across. But just how big is it. Well, think about the Eurasian land mass - Paris to Vladivostok, Deli to Oslo, all of Europe, Russia, India, China, the huge miles of mountains, deserts, steppes, farmland and cities that it consists of. That land mass can approximate to the area of the Milky Way - it's oval shape approximately fitting over it's area. So the next time you are taking a flight eastwards from here, look down at the miles and miles of land rolling underneath your plane and then think about the magnificence of the Sun. If 100,000 light years is equal to about 9,000 km then the sun, that huge ball of fusing hydrogen over a million times the volume of the earth, would be 0.013 mm in diameter. Far far smaller than the full stop ending this sentence. So there you are flying at 10,000 metres over Europe and you are looking down to try and see a dot about one hundredth of a millimetre wide, but what about the other stars? How far away are they? Well, the average distance between stars is estimated to be about 5 light years - that is 450 metres. That is how empty a galaxy is - if it was shrunk down to a scale of Eurasia most of the stars would be about one hundredth of a millimetre dots about 450 metres apart with nothing but empty space in between. So next time you are out on a dark night and are lucky enough to see the shimmer of the Milky Way remember just how big and empty it is - and glory in the power of stars to light that empty space and provide the beauty we can see in the night sky. Another mind blowing fact is just how big stars get - good old Betelgeuse (Beetle Juice) on Orion's shoulder is estimated to have a diameter between 950 and 1200 times bigger than the sun's. On the scale of the Galaxy being Eurasia the sun is an almost invisible dot one hundredth of a millimetre across while Betelgeuse is 12 mm wide - a good sized marble - and Betelgeuse isn't the largest star by a long shot! It's a big old place! Enjoy the night skies looking at it! Edited January 20, 2014 by Chinahand 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quilp Posted January 17, 2014 Share Posted January 17, 2014 Who needs god? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manxman1980 Posted January 17, 2014 Share Posted January 17, 2014 Who needs god? NASA apparently... "This cloud remnant of supernova has been nicknamed the Hand of God by NASA astronomers. The object is a pulsar wind nebula. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/McGill" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quilp Posted January 17, 2014 Share Posted January 17, 2014 Yes, and His all-seeing eye, too, apparently.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Sausages Posted January 17, 2014 Share Posted January 17, 2014 If they keep building bigger telescopes they'll find his knob one day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quilp Posted January 17, 2014 Share Posted January 17, 2014 Yikes! Maybe they already have! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeW Posted January 20, 2014 Share Posted January 20, 2014 And this ladies and gentlemen is how we know God is male.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinahand Posted March 6, 2014 Author Share Posted March 6, 2014 Space is big ... really big ... really, really, really big. And empty ... really empty ... really, really empty. In galactic terms our solar system is a mote on a speck on a smidgen, but when you get to cosmic terms you can say the same thing about our galaxy, but anyway the solar system has a familiar feel, we are used to seeing nice diagrams with the planets lined up showing how big Jupiter is compared to the Earth or the Sun. Those diagrams aren't to scale, because if they were the book would have to have a pull out something like 1000 times wider than the page the planets are drawn in to fit in all that empty space between the planets. Books ... pah so 20th century - on the interwebs you don't need a pull out - you just have to scroll right! Please note this page is big and takes a while to load. It is also very boring composed mostly of almost nothing at all! Enjoy! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Sausages Posted March 6, 2014 Share Posted March 6, 2014 Had a scan through the thread and can't see this being posted. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Sausages Posted March 7, 2014 Share Posted March 7, 2014 Books ... pah so 20th century - on the interwebs you don't need a pull out - you just have to scroll right! Please note this page is big and takes a while to load. It is also very boring composed mostly of almost nothing at all! Enjoy! I scrolled through that last night and it took about half an hour. Half an hour of staring at a black screen. I shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lonan3 Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26605974 Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe. Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being. It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes. "This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University. "I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News. The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2. This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky. The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinahand Posted March 20, 2014 Author Share Posted March 20, 2014 Here's a nice short summary of the BICEP2 results: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vulgarian Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinahand Posted March 22, 2014 Author Share Posted March 22, 2014 Have to say Vulgarian that your picture is incorrect and basically spreading a slur about Dr Tyson. It would be interesting to try to understand where the picture came from - and the "source" of the quote - which, unless it was in the context of a joke, isn't genuine. Tyson got a lot of flak when he commented upon religion, and I have suspicions this links with snark about him from that incident and is trying to blunt his role scientifically explaining just how incredible the universe is, and how the atoms in our bodies were created. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbie Bobster Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 (edited) @china Source is 4chan for the full image with 'quote'. Of course the quote's made up, it's a bastardisation of the oft-used 'grains of sand' comparison. Could throw in a hint of racism as well, perhaps - I've seen some versons of the image with the tag line 'Black Science Guy'. What this topic needs is more Success Kid pictures..... Edited March 22, 2014 by Bobbie Bobster Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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