Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find Doublehelix at Center of Milky Way
An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers report an unprecedented elongated double helix nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, using observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The part of the nebula the astronomers observed stretches 80 light years in length."
You've not really made a clear comparison, as you have compared a measurement involving lightyears (the distance from Earth to Proxima Centauri) to another measurement involving lightyears (the length of the nebula). It would be like comparing an apple to a pea by saying that an orange is about the same size as an apple. You haven't really said anything...
So you've only given the appearance of an insightful comment... though I'm sure you'll hit +5 in no time.
We're just viruses infecting a milkyway cell.
--
make install -not war
I like the night sky, it always provokes deep thoughts. Like, what if the entire galaxy were just a single cell of a universe sized creature? If we were mere atoms, no not even on a scale that big; perhaps the tiniest of particles of particles of an atom, could we ever fully grasp the universe?
Could a single cell grasp, by which I mean sense, beyond its tiny neighbors to sense its place in the minute band of cells that make up even large tissues that in turn form the organ; themselves only part of the larger human creature. Still more, that human itself a seemingly insignificant speck in a sea of billions comprising the organism deemed 'Society.' That "insignificant" speck, like the cell that could be a white blood cell or a cancer cell, has the potential to help, harm or affect that gobal entity it is a part of.
What if the galaxy is not just a cell but an early cell; one undeveloped and still growing. Perhaps its culturing intelligent orders. Intelligents vast, streached thin between its stars; creating networks like those in a cell yet not governed by chemical interaction but in the perhaps equally predictable economics of cultural interaction. A growing cell; incubating intelligence that would mature the galatic cell in a way to interact with neighboring galactic cells, ultimatly tailoring (based on the surrounding galactic cells) the function of this galaxy.
A galaxy only a fraction of a fraction of a greater whole. A galaxy of intelect unaware beyond simple sensing of the galaxies beyond its neighbors, of its place; perhaps like a human cell. A universal organism ordered by a force greater and more mysterious than comprehensible; not unlike a comparison of the chemical interactions that govern a cell's behavior and the economical interactions that govern society. A Universal organism beyond conventions of the word. A Universal Organism that provokes its own environment and leads its own...
...deep thoughts.
Demented But Determined.
As the man in black explains to Roland in the first book of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, "The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size... ... For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe..?"
What great poetry in the universe, that we should gaze out into the infinite deep of space, only to see the same elegent beauty that we see when we probe the mysteries deep within ourselves.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-Voltaire
According to the story, the magnetic field has energy equivalent to 1,000 supernovae, although it's overall magnetic field is 1,000 times weaker than the sun. Therefore this magnetic field must cover an immense volume, if the sun was as powerful as a supernovae (which it's not, so think even larger than this figure...), then that would mean that this magnetic field is coming from a volume 1,000,000 times larger than the sun (something like that anyway, it sounds pretty good :P). Sure there's much, much bigger things in the universe, but, as already stated by others, you can't just say "oh, it's so big!" that's all relative. So, yeh, I could say that it's a really big thing and be shot down by someone telling me it's not so big, or I could give you a figure.
A magnetic field in the middle of the galaxy over 1,000,000 times the volume of the sun. That's big :P
You can't think of something incomprehensibly fast in terms of something incomprehensibly large and say you understand it.
If anything, the fact that it takes a measurable amount of time to traverse the earth-moon distance by something so fast it seems instantaneous to us is just an indication of how far the moon really is away. (385000 km, about ten times further than the circumference of the earth.)
And the circumference of the earth is a bloody long way. 40000 km. If you were to try walking this distance, it would take you more than a year of continuous walking (no sleep)
As said, the moon is about ten times further away than that, 385000 km, about ten years of walking.
The sun is one astronomical unit away. (150 Million kilometers) 4280 years of walking. You'd have to have started walking about the time the first pyramid was built to get there by today.
The nearest star to the sun is just over 4 light years away (40 Million Million km) One thousand million years of walking. I'm running out of timescales to compare this to now, because human experience doesn't date anywhere near as far back. This timescale now compares roughly to the age of life on earth, and even the age of the earth itself is only about four times as large.
The nebula in the article is about ten times that size. Ten thousand million years of walking. If you wanted to walk that distance, you'd have to start at a time where neither earth nor sun existed, or would exist for billions of years. The solar system around that time would probably be little more than a localised gravitational aggregation of spinning gas.
You're right that one could keep going for quite a lot longer. Once one starts considering the distances in the universe, you can think of them only in numbers, they're so huge. The upshot of this is that in a universe where all mayor distances are unimaginably huge, this one is one of them.
But if you're interested in experiencing these speeds and distances, I'd suggest you give Celestia a try. It's a 3d simulation that puts you smack bang into the middle of our solar system, and you can whiz around, visit nicely textured planets and even leave and visit other stars, other galaxies. Really beautiful graphics. You can actually move from the earth to the moon at walking speed, or at light speed.
Behold the predictive powers of ROCK!!!
...Double helix in the sky tonight
Throw out the hardware, let's do it right...
Steely Dan - Aja (1977)
And, er, observations of space plasmas. I know a couple of astrophysicists who are quite well-versed in plasma physics (one of whom grilled me nicely on my oral qualifier). And the planetary scientists who are dealing with Enceladus and Mars are generally cut more from the space physics cloth than the astrophysics cloth--they probably have somebody doing plasmas next door.
Yes, many astrophysicists are used to gravity as the force that organizes the universe, but there are plenty who deal with gas and plasma dynamics, not to mention tons (relatively) of observational space plasma physicists.