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Milky Way Is Twice the Size We Thought
Peter writes to tell us about a research group at the University of Sydney in Australia, who in the middle of some calculation wanted to check the numbers everybody uses for the thickness of our galaxy at the core. Using data available freely on the Internet and analyzing it in a spreadsheet, they discovered in a matter of hours that the Milky Way is 12,000 light years thick, vs. the 6,000 that had been the consensus number for some time.
Yeah, it comes with "%30 MORE!" now.
Obesity is everywhere.
Wikipedia says it's only 1000 light years thick.
So I read the article (yeah, yeah - I know...I was bored) and I hope the spreadsheet software used wasn't Excel - we all know how well that counts.
The Mothership
Snickers is only about half the size
Now you guys tell me!
What the Fudge man, I have been eating Snickers all this time thinking I'm getting more chocolate! Now I find this out?
What we're seeing now is middle age spread.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
[1] Now known to consist of dark matter and dark energy, which is why you can't see them.
This reminds me of a famous politician who was mentioning WMD in a speech he was having written, and wanted to cite the original source where they were discovered in a certain country or other. He couldn't find it. No one else he talked to could either. It turns out that what was a common assumption (and turned out false) had never actually been verified. So he winged it.
Use something a layman could understand OK?
Say, how many Library of Congress, or elephants, have we got here?
...We are told that the sun's light takes approx 8 minutes to reach us, but now we know that the distance involved is twice as much so therefore the speed of light must be approximately double what we thought! ...if the moon is twice as far away as previously thought, how come astronauts have landed successfully - in theory, they should get 'there' and be in the middle of nowhere ...UNLESS, of course they never went....AH HA!!!
AT&ROFLMAO
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
(Animated calliope interlude)
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Given that Excel is so notoriously inaccurate when doing floating point calculations, I'd be interested if someone else did this in another application. I wonder if they would get the same result.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So every time someone forget to divide by 2 , he is going to claim he came up with a major discovery ??
42
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
True. Article doesn't say what spreadsheet package he used.
The only way to find out would be to buy the journal article, thrillingly entitled "Modeling the Milky Way: Spreadsheet Science".
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You really CAN get stuff on the net to double your size.
***GUARANTEED increase your galaxy by 6,000 light years***
thick and sturdy clusters. ladies love dark matter. hawking beautiful einstein copernicus keppler cassini
jplab buzz lightyear wormhole
[sorry--I couldn't resist]
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Are you absolutely sure that you are right? (i.e. you know an absolute truth.) And if you are when you say this, does that mean you are a charlatan, liar or cheat?
Now I have to pack an extra suitcase.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm getting ########### myself.
Read my sig.
You're an arrogant little shit, aren't you? Arrogant? Yes. A shit? Yes. But not little. Glad to have ticked you off.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton