Slashdot Mirror
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..."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Just be careful of the words "throw away", "give away" and "books" in Henico County, VA
"Mine, mine! Geroff! Mine!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
a swirl of caramel and chocolate?
antipaucity
The evidence they found tells us that this MAY be a barred spiral galaxy, it is not yet, theres just good strong evidence that could lead to a barred-sprial conclusion.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
"the bar is oriented at about a 45-degree angle relative to the main plane of the galaxy"
I'm pretty sure that this means "Do not enter" according to international standards.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away...
Which happens every year at the university level anyway, where a new 'edition' comes out every year with one or two pages slightly modified, but you have to buy the new one for $150 since the questions and homework study in the appendix are completely different. No, I'm not bitter that the fall semester is coming or anything.
Right, and the next thing you'll tell me is that the Earth isn't flat! And that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. Blasphemers!
Is actually a candy bar. Here is proof that the candy bar came before the galaxy. A company called Mars, Inc. makes them.
Just wait until the collision happens: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/
I don't get it.
Well, dammit, I guess I'm going to have to rethink my entire Star Hero Terran Empires roleplaying campaign.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
This is actually not very surprising. As the article points out, bars are common spiral galaxies. It would have been more surprising to find conclusive evidence against a bar.
My high school chemistry textbook said that the atmosphere was 80% nitrogen and 23% oxygen, and that didn't need to be thrown away. So we'll just blame this shape-of-the-galaxy thing on sig figs.
I always knew that the milky way was a bar, and that it is filled with nougat.
...looks like I'm going to have to get new business cards.
The fact the milky way is a normal spiral is a fundamental tenet of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and this new evidenc is just a theory. I demand that people continue to teach my older (wrong) alternative theory.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
... the Milky Way is in fact a barred spiral!
Mmmmmm... Milky Way Bar...
They'll just issue a patch for every book. They'll just give everyone a sticker and tell them wich page and paragraphs to stick it on. ;)
This is actually more of a confirmation of prior work. See the following, for example, which dates back two years.
Title: The Galactic Bar
Authors: Merrifield, M. R.
Journal: Milky Way Surveys: The Structure and Evolution of our Galaxy, Proceedings of ASP Conference #317. The 5th Boston University Astrophysics Conference held 15-17 June, 2003 at Boston University, Boston, MA, USA. Edited by Dan Clemens, Ronak Shah, and Teresa Brainerd. San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2004., p.289
Abstract:
Like the majority of spiral galaxies, the Milky Way contains a central non-axisymmetric bar component. Our position in the Galactic plane renders it rather hard to see, but also allows us to make measurements of the bar that are completely unobtainable for any other system. This paper reviews the evidence for a bar that can be gleaned from the many extensive surveys of both gas and stars in the Milky Way. We introduce some simplified models to show how the basic properties of the bar can be inferred in a reasonably robust manner despite our unfavorable location, and how the complex geometry can be used to our advantage to obtain a unique three-dimensional view of the bar. The emerging picture of the Galactic bar is also placed in the broader context of current attempts to understand how such structures form and evolve in spiral galaxies.
Next week, I'm sure we'll all be thrilled to learn that the sky is blue. Rewrite the textbooks!
e.g.
public class CBarredSpiral : CSpiral
As the article said, "May." We need to send someone outside the galaxy, so they can look and make a positive determination.
Fight Spammers!
Not exactly a "revelation"- I learned that the Milky Way was a barred spiral in a Slashdot story three years ago.
There is a difference between stagnant and conservative. Stagnant means the religions do not change over time, and that is not true, there is tremendous change over the past millennia in religion. Conservative is not taking what is currently popular ideas in blindly incorporating them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The "throw away the textbooks" comment is a little snarky. The text I currently use, as well as most of the others in use, describe the Milky Way as *possibly* having some kind of barred shape, as there has been evidence along these lines for years. Books evolve. 15-year old books don't have much to difinitively say on the cosmological constant, either, though they may be perfectly good texts on all other phenomena.
> Well the actual problem is people on both sides. First you have one group who believes that science is actual truth, and that all the problems in the world can be fixed with science.
I suspect that most scientists actually believe that science is an attempt to get at the truth, and will likely never be complete. And that only some problems can be fixed with science.
> Religion on the other hand is more of a combined study where you put together many different studies and look at the truth as a whole
Actually, religion looks at mythology and people's opinions about theology, morals, the proper social order, and the existence of a lot of unevidenced supernatural stuff.
> The main difference is science is trying to constantly disprove itself while religion is trying to prove itself. They are not opposing forces just different methods of trying to find truth.
Religion, most often, merely attempts to maintain traditional beliefs and values. Those who are "trying to find truth" usually get kicked out of the club, because truth is rarely deferential to traditional beliefs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Everyone's said my directions suck. I kept telling them, "It's a huge spiral, you can't miss it!", and they keep calling me a useless monkey-boy who couldn't navigate my way into a black hole.
There's a good article over on Space.com about this news, too!
Kneel Before Christ!
...there are no pictures of the Milky Way from space? Whenever I've Googled for pictures of the Milky Way, I either get artist renderings or these stupid pictures of a strip of the night sky. Since we've supposedly went into space a lot of time, we should have good photos of the Milky Way from space. Even moreso since the Voyager spacecraft left the universe a year or so ago. When the voyager left our universe, it should have had a great shot of the entire galaxy and all it's planets. I mean, the universe is what... like ten million miles wide or something, right?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Please, first of all, don't feed the offtopic troll.
Second, there's a difference between being open-minded and just plain trying to justify remaining religious while supporting popular scientific theories. Personally, as a believer in what I guess is called the postmodern philosophy, I'm extremely skeptical about most things, especially things of universal magnitude. I just don't think there's any evidence whatsoever to suggest intelligent design is possible, and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary that the Divine Scenario and the Scientific Scenario are completely and totally mutually exclusive. The truly open-minded cannot ascribe absolute faith towards any one theory, or they risk alienating the possibility of other ideas (and you realize that christianity, judaism, islam, et. al. depend on absolute faith); therefore, the only options you have are to either admit that you absolutely believe creationism and assert with ultimate certainty that god created the universe, or to assert that you depend on scientific evidence, and that you cannot express with complete certainty that god created the universe.
Also, I don't think calling someone a moron or a fool because of their beliefs is wrong. I think it's a dastardly thing to do unless you actually show evidence supporting your point of view, but I think calling people idiots and fools is an integral part of the free exchange of information; and aside which, they're not getting any more intelligent with you patting them on the back and saying "good idiot".
I intend to be called an idiot and a fool in response to this, and also probably be modded down as much as my karma can stand, but this just has to be said. That's what I believe.
+5, Truth
or even if you don't. They've been saying for a while that the data points towars a barred spiral and the only thing I'm seeing that is new is the 45 degree bit which isn't unusual in barred spirals. There's a good number with folded bar layout already in the catalogs. We are pretty sure that the galaxy has eaten other smaller dwarfs and possibly one or more larger ones earlier on, but the upcoming Andromeda collision is going to be the big one. Too bad we'll be extinct through evolution or as one large Darwin Award by then.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Arguments from incredulity may satisfy your faith, but in the pursuit of knowledge, they're in fact worse than useless.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The joys of reading too fast. I thought you said, "I don't mind going along with the notion that God (who I believe was the creator) could have used many things that scientists hold true and call "evolution" and the "Big Bong" to get us to where we are today."
Now THAT, I could believe ;)
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
What a load of blather. Science is simply a way of attempting to explain observed data and make predictions upon it. It isn't a religion any more than hammers or toothpicks are religion. Maybe some misguided souls who likely don't understand science think of it in that fashion, but science is a methodology, a means of determing provisional explanations. Have you ever heard of a religion that says "to the best evidence we have to date is explained by , but we await more data"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I always knew it was a bar.
Proverbs 21:19
Douglas Adams would be rolling on the floor upon hearing that there was a bar at the center of the galaxy...
If, on the other hand, you mean a more nebulous intelligent designer that leant a helping hand, then while I disagree with you (being an atheist), it isn't anti-scientific (though not a scientific concept) and I have no quarrel with you at all. Many researchers are essentially theistic evolutionists or simply believe that God "helps" out, if even just in the starting conditions of the Universe.
So it all really depends o what you mean by Intelligent Design.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> This has been precisely my argument in favor of Intelligent Design. Evolution could have been the product of the creator stacking the dominoes so the right tap made it all happen. Evolution and the Big Bang may have been the implementation of "the Design."
FYI, that's not an argument in favor of ID. It's merely an argument that ID could be framed in such a way that it would not be in conflict with the known facts.
Unicorn Theory can also be framed in such a way that it is not in conflict with the known facts, but an argument in favor of UT is another matter altogether.
And that's precisely the problem with ID. When you analyze their arguments and spot them for the bunkum that they are, you're left without any reason to believe in ID. That's not a proof that no IDer exists, but it leaves ID in the same category as UT, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, PSI power, and other stuff that some people believe in without any evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My beliefs are perfectly valid! I'm not a fool or a moron! Wheee!
:-) So let's go with your theory for the moment. Where did the Shake 'n Bake come from?
:-)
Well, I should have seen that predictable response coming
At the end of your life of Earth, evolution, the Big Bang and other theories are interesting academic exercises but they don't do anything if you are more than worm food and there is a Creator. Not believing may or may not get you "in". Being a jerk about it and those who believe probably won't score brownie points
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I teach astronomy. We've known for quite a few years that the Milky Way is a barred spiral (observations of carbon stars being the best most recent proof prior to Spitzer) and known for decades before that it might be a barred spiral. And a barred spiral IS a spiral galaxy. Cool result in any event.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
So it all really depends o what you mean by Intelligent Design.
:-) I don't debate ID anywhere (but here) and I don't subscribe to whatever textbook ID there is out there, although I've heard my theories from others. As soon as I mention this, I usually get beat down on the basis of absolute faith and absolute interpretation of the Bible. I think you can have the former without the latter.
:) {/joke}
I subscribe to ID Version 5.3.Goody-pre-1
I don't abhor the teaching of Evolution or other scientific theories, but I do deplore the pravailing attitude on Slashdot that religion is a joke or that all ID and Creationism is bunk. I may not have math formulas to back me up, but I have Faith, a good book to live by, events that are recorded to have happened, and the testimony of others.
And anyways, my theory and version of ID ties it all together, so I'm right and you're all wrong !!!
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Strawman to the nth degree.
Your comment reveals a profound ignorance of what science is about. Anyone who believes science reveals truth doesn't understand science. Science is the search for fact. not truth. As Indiana Jones memorably said,
Furthermore, the purpose of science isn't to "solve problems"; it is the search for fact.
And ever since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment displacing Rationalism in the 18th century, science never seeks to prove anything. In science you can disprove, but you cannot prove because of the principle of skepticism. So the statement "if science can't 100% prove it, other theories are fair game" makes no sense at all.
The purpose of science is the search for fact. Science is the study of the natural world. Religion and philosophy are there to provide commentary on and understanding of the human condition. From that perspective, they have nothing to do with each other and should not be mixed.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
1000 old, used, astronomy text books for $50! This weekend only!
... Actually, I've heard/read that the treatment was manual stimulation to produce orgasm.
What is a color if not something that we perceive to be as such?
;-)
We might point out that there's a critical difference between "The sky is blue" and "The sky appears blue". The first isn't quite correct, because "blue" isn't actually an accurate description of the sky's spectrum. The second is correct, because it acknowledges that the color depends on the observer's optical equipment.
It would be even better to say "The sky appears blue to the human eye". It has different colors to other animals. Thus, birds have four visual pigments. Three are like ours; the fourth has peak sensitivity around the violet end of human vision. To birds, the sky would stimulate the blue and violet pigments about equally, and the sky would appear a complex blue/violet/UV blend. An avian interior decorator would have words for those colors. Something similar would happen with a lot of insects, who typically have a V/UV-sensitive pigment but often no red-sensitive pigment.
To get even pickier, we might note that in mammals, birds and insects, there is significant variation in the actual frequency response of the visual pigments. There is also intra-species variation in many species. Humans are one such. When I was in high school back in the 60's, a physics teacher did a lab demo of this. He set up a prism to give a solar spectrum, and it was good enough that he could use a couple of absorbtion lines to calibrate it and label the frequencies. Then he had us go up to the paper and put marks at where we saw the ends of the rainbow-colored bar. The marks were approximately normally-distributed around the 400-nm and 700-nm points. The students were duly impressed by this demo of the variations in their color vision.
He went on to explain that any of us into photography should appreciate this. Different people have different opinions about how good various films and printers reproduce colors. This is partly because their pigments can't match the visual pigments for all of us exactly. How good a picture's colors look is partly determined by how closely the pigments match your visual pigments. Because human eyes vary so much, no printing system using only a few pigments can be accurate for all of us. (In my case, the red ended somewhat past the average for the class, but my violet mark was right at the average.)
But imagine how our pictures (and computer screens) must look to birds. The violets and ultraviolets are missing. It would be like us looking at a picture that has all its blues zeroed out.
A lot of birds and insects have ultraviolet markings, as do the flowers that they pollinate and the fruit that they eat. These markings are invisible to human eyes. Biologists have only recently learned to appreciate this, and a lot of mysterious behavior has become clearer as a result.
In particular, it turns out that a lot of avian navigation can only be understood if you realize that they see ultraviolet and they see polarization. There are situations in which birds are using polarized ultraviolet/violet sky light. If you can't see this yourself, you have difficulty explaining their behavior, because the sky just looks plain "blue" to you.
Info on the topic is easily available online. For avian color vision, google for "avian color vision". Use some photographic or printers' terms to find discussions in those subject areas. What you see through your eyes is only the start of undstanding what color the sky is.
(And I can hear the shouts of "Too much information!"
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Another bar... so much for the neighborhood.
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
...I found a 1934 high school science book, and found it to be one of the most informative books I've ever read....other than the sections on chemistry and physics, it was still accurate, and those sections were only lacking because of discoveries we've since made in those fields (new elements, quantum theory, etc). Especially helpful were the practical examples; when discussing electricity, they wouldn't just give dry theory. They'd give an excellent diagram and lay out in detailed, plain language how a dynamo works. I immiedietly thought "If they'd had books like this in my time, I'd have gotten straight A's". There was a lot of emphasis on teaching science in relation to everday practical work, such as engineering and construction. Lots of things like examples of the internal combustion engine, steel construction, concrete usage...you name it, heat, light, sound, they layed out some kind of practical everyday example to give it meaning and make sense. That's desperately needed in textbooks. Similarly, I've found grammer books from that period much superior to what kids get in school today, especially the rhetoric books. Today, most people see rhetoric as speech, but then, rhetoric covered both speaking and writing, and students had to study both. I think we've suffered a bit by not making that emphasis anymore.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
...the existence of a restaurant at the end of the universe.
The purpose of science is the search for fact.
... Maybe I should preview this one, to make sure that none of my editing has garbled anything. ;-)
Well, yes. But an important side effect is generating and testing explanations of those facts. With an emphasis on testing, which usually means you have to go out and collect more facts (usually called observations, or just data). So as a scientist, most of your life will always be collecting the facts that you need.
One of the more pointed explanations that Stephen Jay Gould made about evolution was to point out that Darwin didn't show that evolution had happened. By the time Darwin was born, this was an accepted fact among scientists. All these fossils had been dug up, and they showed a clear set of changes with time. Geologists got involved, and concurred with the whole thing. Nobody who actually studied the fossil data questioned this. But the observed evolution was very non-random, and a good explanation was lacking.
What Darwin did was to present a theory that explained why the fossil record showed certain kinds of evolutionary change and not others. And, most important, his theory was testable. Incidentally, it offended religious people, because it didn't need an intelligent guiding hand. Scientists immediately jumped all over it, of course, and managed to collect a great deal more data that kept coming up consistent with Darwin's theory. Religious people also jumped all over it, but they didn't understand scientific testing methods, so they couldn't disprove anything, or even understand why they were expected to do so.
And, of course, lots of philosopher types have pointed out that none of this ever dealt with proof or truth. Rather, people had simply failed to find data that disproved Darwin's theory. This sort of double negative is standard scientific method, and is where the term valid comes in. That just means a theory that can successfully explain all the observed data despite many attempts to shoot it down. It doesn't mean truth, because we might have several valid theories competing at once, and new facts might pop up at any time that would shoot down any of them. A valid theory is only tentativily accepted, because it has passed a number of tests and hasn't (yet) failed any. See Karl Popper for lots more words on this topic.
Similarly, Einstein made some rather outrageous predictions about the universe's behavior just a century ago. This was in an attempt to find a theory that explained some rather outrageous observations (i.e., facts) by other scientists in previous decades. Since then, physicists have repeatedly found new ways to collect data that could disprove some of Einstein's equations. They have repeatedly failed; his equations always predict results that are within the error bars of the observations. Maybe next month someone will find an exception, but for now, we have to accept Einstein's theories as valid descriptions of our universe.
Now, scientists often carelessly use true for valid, when true should really only be used for facts. A fact can be true or false; i.e. it does or doesn't describe an actual observation; a theory can only be valid or invalid. It's true that evolution has happened on our planet, but Darwin's theory isn't true; it's valid (so far).
Of course, all of this is above the mental capacity of most of the media or the political system (or the religious communities). So we have an ongoing bogus "debate" on such topics.
(Hmmm
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The issue of truth is not so crucial. There is nothing wrong with looking for truth. There is only something wrong with the arrogance involved in thinking one has found it. Science, at it's best, looks at the world in hope of one day finding the truth. It is seldom that the scientist believes they hav found the truth, or has the arrogance to state that the revealed theory is hogwash based on personal belief. In such cases, the revealed theory still wins.
The problem is really that the people who attack science tend to confuse themselves with god, and believe not only that they have the capacity to understand the truth, but that they have found it. In fact, the truth is the sole provenience of god, and it is the privilege of us lower being to examine the creation and try to understand some of it.
The situation gets worse as the arrogance goes beyond the belief that one is god, to the belief that one is such a wonderful god that one can put the entire truth of creation into one text. At this point stupidity replaces arrogance, as all that can be done is to fit new fact patterns in existing theories of existence. A person who does such a thing is arrogant, stupid, and corrupt beyond the ability to be saved by any messiah, prophet, or wise person. Such people are best locked up in the ghetto of an old sports arena, so their disease can be contained, and the harm to civilized society minimized.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry