The Milky Way is Not a Spiral?

ETEQ writes "Space.com reports that new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope showing that the Milky Way is in fact a barred spiral! Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away..."

Comments

It looks that way for now.

[rob_squared]

Just wait until the collision happens: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/

Re:It looks that way for now.

[Rakshasa Taisab]

There are (well reasoned) theories that the spirals are caused by earlier collisions. Thus this future collision will actually help produce new spirals. It is considered possible that the rotation of the galaxy will wind up the spirals so much they will disappear over time.

Other interesting aspects of the spirals is that they do not actually contain much more mass, 5% more iirc, than the space between the spirals. There is a larger number of new stars being formed in the spirals, thus the bright but shortlived stars make them visible.

These star births are caused by the compression of cold molecular clouds. Thus when another smaller galaxy collides it may cause shockwaves to travel through the galaxy compressing the molecular clouds.

Re:Not Exactly

[Carnildo]

This isn't exactly news, either. I recall seeing reports of this in magazines like Scientific American at least fifteen years ago.

Re:Not Exactly

[the_mighty_$]

If the submitter had actually read the article....no, I guess that's too much to ask.

Quote FTA "The bar is made of relatively old and red stars, the survey shows. It is about 27,000 light-years long, or roughly 7,000 light-years longer than previously thought." (emphasis mine)

In other words, the news isn't that they just discovered the Milky War is a bared spiral galaxy, the news is that the Milky Way's bar is 7,000 light-years longer than scientists thought.

Predictions for the world of 2105

[Savantissimo]

Essentially all the new physical theories will be seen as the most transparent bull - inflation, the age and structure of the universe, the standard model, M-theory...

Psychiatric drug therapy of today will be seen in the same light as trying to fix jet engines using nothing but fuel additives. Most current forms of morality and immorality will be demonstrated to be correctable mental defects.

All sex laws and taboos will be seen as medieval.

More than 99.9% of people in the solar system will be able to outscore 99.9% of today's people on today's mental tests, but we would regard most of them as cheating. They will regard their enhancements as part of themselves or as corrective devices, like eyeglasses are today.

The concept of privacy, even for thoughts, will be as antique and nominal as the divine right of kings is today; nevertheless, people will be more free in the sense of usable personal power than they ever were in the past.

Global cooling will be a concern, but manageable.

Only a few fundamentalists will keep traditional 100% human bodies, or for that matter just one body. Some will have as many bodies as todays people have shirts.

Most "persons" in existence will not have been born at all. Greater than 90% of the population will have predominantly non-biological substrates, but some of these will have been born, while many of the mostly bio-based people will not have been. The sentient population will exceed 1 trillion by most measures, but will be difficult to decide how to count the self-aware corporations, partials and copies, distributed intellects, acorporeal persons and so forth. Most people will be very young by today's standards, but this will have little correlation with experience and knowledge, which will not necessarily be linked with personal histories.

Lamarck will be seen as not all that far off the mark. Epigenetic and protein-reaction-web engineering will be a basic ability like computer programming is today. The supposed decoding of the human genome at the end of the 20th century will be regarded as about as complete as Columbus' understanding of world geography. Virtually everything important will be in the introns, methylation etc. and in protein regulation of the genetic molecules.

Genetics (and other substrate codes) will be seen as easier to correct than personal environmental history , but not by much.

The expression "willful ignorance" will be seen as self-evidently redundant.

The theory of relativity will have undergone significant modifications.

Archaelology and paleontology will be essentially competed sciences, and today's theories will be seen as wrong in virtually every respect.

Teleportation will be commonplace, but will be based on information rather than matter per se traversing distances.

Eric Drexler's predictions in Engines of Creation and Nanosystems will be seen as being as over-conservative as Ben Franklin's speculations about the use of electricity.

Consciousness will be more fully understood than quantum mechanics is today. Indeed, they will turn out to be related, but only in a very vaguely similar manner to most of the 20th century speculations in that vein.

There will have been at least one more war which killed over 1,000,000 people, but none in at least 30 years.

Strong AI will show up late in the game, and won't take off instantly, but will have far surpassed human levels in every way in the late decades of the 21st century.