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What Exactly Is a Galaxy?

Posted by Soulskill on from the will-smith-will-figure-it-out dept.

sciencehabit writes "Surprising as it may sound, astronomers don't have an answer to this basic question. There's no agreement on when a collection of stars stops being a cluster and starts being something more. Now, in an echo of the recent wrangling over Pluto's status as a planet, a pair of astrophysicists from Australia and Germany want to start a debate on the issue — and they have even set up a Web site for people to cast their votes." While we're on the subject of galaxies, reader mvar pointed out that astronomers using data from Hubble have spotted what could be a new record holder for the most distant known galaxy, located roughly 13.2 billion light years from Earth.

1 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Standard for astronomy. by Anonymous+Freak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lots of astronomical terms are very vague in their definition. Heck, "planet" was only officially defined a couple years ago.

    There is no "official" difference between "ocean" and "sea", either.

    --
    Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
    The purpose of that site was not known.