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.

Comments

Re:Good or bad?

[dotancohen]

I'm surprised that _spreadsheet_ software was used to calculate this. Once the conclusion was made that the correct width should be twice the accepted size, the numbers should have been verified with Mathematica, or better yet, an open source (peer-reviewed code is just as important as peer-reviewed research) solution such as Maxima.

OK, silent no more...

[WheelDweller]

These are the people who helped the "TIME/LIFE apes" come to pass through a combination of bad science and media's lack of concern for the truth. [The ape-to-man display that shows a monkey on one end, an accountant on the other, despite some of the 'apes' being out of place by millions of years, and despite deciding what one of them looked like based on a single tooth...]

These are the people who are constantly telling us about distant celestial collisions and saying "That's what'll happen to us in 54 billion years" even though the information is a) completely useless to anyone with a heartbeat and b) a guess, at best.

And isn't it these people...and the [theoretically] trying to convince us that a) change to the climate is going to kill us b) We're the cause and c) we have any control over it whatsoever and d) it can be solved by sending people money, despite the fact they can't forecast THE WEATHER more than a week ahead?

Now, am I to understand that these brilliant, bastions of faith who we should 'absolutely trust' with our immortal souls, since they're so much more accurate than the Bible....NOW TELL US THEY'VE MIS-MEASURED OUR GALAXY BY A FACTOR OF TWO??!?!?!?! OUR OWN GALAXY? ONE WE CAN ACTUALLY "SEE" FROM HERE? (Consensus isn't science.)

We've been trusting science for far too long.

See this is why I suspect everybody of idiocy

[Master of Transhuman]

especially "scientists" who claim to be able to tell me "big things" like the age of the universe, the speed of light, the size of the universe, and all this other crap.

These morons get it wrong as often as they get it right.

How many times in my lifetime has the "size of the universe" been increased? I'll bet about a dozen times. I remember reading at least one article where one guy essentially doubled the size overnight.

One would conclude by now that nobody KNOWS the "size of the universe", rather than suggesting that "well, we're getting better at it."

This is not a general neo-Luddite rant against science. It's simply a reasonable skepticism that certain facts can be known precisely in the absence of being able to SEE or MEASURE them directly, rather than by convoluted methods that depend on everybody getting it right. That kind of thing is like programming - you end up with bugs, not perfection.