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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..."
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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!
Just wait until the collision happens: http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/
I don't get it.
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
Not exactly a "revelation"- I learned that the Milky Way was a barred spiral in a Slashdot story three years ago.
> 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 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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
... Actually, I've heard/read that the treatment was manual stimulation to produce orgasm.
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