There is a fellow listed at that site as the American distributer. I emailed him to ask about pricing and I might post his response here if I can remember to.
As I try to imagine what is going on, I imagine
that by now the area in the vicinity of the black
hole is stable. With most everything orbiting
the black hole, not much drops in. So it is not
surprising that the area is not highly luminous.
What causes the luminosity spikes then? Perhaps
it is when two objects near miss each other,
throwing one of the objects into an orbit which
then gets eaten by the black hole.
> I distinctly remember crying at the end of the first read of LOTR,
> not so much because I was empathizing with the characters, but
> because I didn't want the story to ever end.
I had a similar major let-down at the end, but I did not come to tears. I considered that ending a bit, and finally concluded that that was Tolkien's point with the ending: Most of life is monotonous, it is rare that we get to live through epic events, and we must come to grips with this.
There are some key points made in the original article. (http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/)
One statement there says "the gap is closing at 500000 km/hour". I am not a professional astronomer, but I understand that we can not currently determine the proper motion of objects farther away from us than a few tens of light years. So although we know that Andromeda and the Milky Way are hurtling toward each other at 500 thousand kilometers per hour, we do not know how fast they are moving with respect to each other in the sideways direction. It is highly likely that the proper motion component of the relative velocities is greater than zero. If there is a high enough proper velocity, this would mean that the two galaxies, being in orbit about a common point, would miss when they came to their closest point and just fly right by each other.
The article touches on this with "the best
explanation is that the Milky Way and Andromeda are in fact a bound pair of galaxies in orbit around one another." But they make no reference to the unknown proper motion.
Also, it is possible that the galaxy we live in now may well be the result of a historic collision of two smaller galaxies. The evidence for this is that the Magellinic Clouds are now in orbit around the Milky Way and are irregular. Now, this is speculation on my part, but that's allowed, isn't it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Does any fellow slashdotter have a clue
There is a fellow listed at that site as the American distributer. I emailed him to ask about pricing and I might post his response here if I can remember to.
- Paul
This looks good (expect for the pics you could not get). Thanks a lot.
As I try to imagine what is going on, I imagine
that by now the area in the vicinity of the black
hole is stable. With most everything orbiting
the black hole, not much drops in. So it is not
surprising that the area is not highly luminous.
What causes the luminosity spikes then? Perhaps
it is when two objects near miss each other,
throwing one of the objects into an orbit which
then gets eaten by the black hole.
> I distinctly remember crying at the end of the first read of LOTR,
> not so much because I was empathizing with the characters, but
> because I didn't want the story to ever end.
I had a similar major let-down at the end, but I did not come to tears. I considered that ending a bit, and finally concluded that that was Tolkien's point with the ending: Most of life is monotonous, it is rare that we get to live through epic events, and we must come to grips with this.
One statement there says "the gap is closing at 500000 km/hour". I am not a professional astronomer, but I understand that we can not currently determine the proper motion of objects farther away from us than a few tens of light years. So although we know that Andromeda and the Milky Way are hurtling toward each other at 500 thousand kilometers per hour, we do not know how fast they are moving with respect to each other in the sideways direction. It is highly likely that the proper motion component of the relative velocities is greater than zero. If there is a high enough proper velocity, this would mean that the two galaxies, being in orbit about a common point, would miss when they came to their closest point and just fly right by each other.
The article touches on this with "the best explanation is that the Milky Way and Andromeda are in fact a bound pair of galaxies in orbit around one another." But they make no reference to the unknown proper motion.
Also, it is possible that the galaxy we live in now may well be the result of a historic collision of two smaller galaxies. The evidence for this is that the Magellinic Clouds are now in orbit around the Milky Way and are irregular. Now, this is speculation on my part, but that's allowed, isn't it.