That's the first time I've seen you swear! I was shocked! I'm use to swearing, I work in a very active environment, but I haven't sworn in a long time. You do as you see fit, my friend. But, I will refrain - profanity spreads like wildfire. When you've had a 1-yr-old in a pram tell you to fuffoff, it really makes you think...
To refrane from hi-jacking this thread, I sent you a PM.
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djjd62
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Mon 28 Jun, 2010 02:26 pm
good stuff edgar
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.
Thank you very much. I never thought of it like that before.
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Philis
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Wed 30 Jun, 2010 12:38 am
HUGE Beautiful awe inspiring
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electronicmail
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Thu 1 Jul, 2010 05:36 am
@edgarblythe,
The e-mail you got from your friend was accurate as of many years ago, NASA has updated its statistics after even bigger suns were located with the new telescopes
Quote:
UPDATE! As of January 2009, we now know about some other really big stars. One is called Eta Carinae. It has a size about 800 times that of our Sun, a mass about 100 times that of our Sun, and is about 4,000,000 times brighter than our Sun. And, yet, we do not think it is the biggest! Recent observations of a star called VY Canus Majoris show that it has a size between 600 and 2100 times the size of our Sun!
To get an idea of the size of a star 2,000 times the size of our sun NASA calculates light would take 8 hours to cross the star's diameter. They also calculate the maximum size of a star is about 2,600 the size of our sun. After that gravity takes over and it collapses inwards.
Thank you for posting these pics but I don't understand why you call them "humbling". A sense of awe at the cosmos isn't the same thing as humility at all. Instead I'm proud to be alive at a time when we can see and calculate all these wonderful things. And I agree with the posters who said we shouldn't be wasting a single second of the precious time we have given to us, and do our best to deserve it. Starting with wasting less time on internet forums like this one is on my list of priorities
Living in our little backwater means we don't get exposed to the violently intense radiation in the middle of our galactic center. Some things are better viewed from afar.
Most of all these marvels in the cosmos make me wonder what comes next in our own evolution. Not that I expect to live another 10 million years to witness anything like the chimp to homo sapiens transition but if anyone has any reliable projections please post them here. There's some indications evolution is accelerating but I don't understand how that's measured. 10 million years is a small time period, astronomically speaking, and I hope that during it we'll manage interstellar travel. We're safe anyway until our sun gives up 5 billion years from now.
Yeah, downtown can be too much action at times. If this NASA projection is right, 10 million years from now this is what will happen to the center of our Milky Way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9RQx2PcmLM
The other thing is nobody may be around to see it if the earth is turned into a dead planet well before that. Which we're well on our way to achieving with our idiotic policies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEhhVmxYSNI&feature=bulletin
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jeeprs
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Thu 1 Jul, 2010 06:34 am
@edgarblythe,
just as well for us that size ain't everything.....
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electronicmail
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Thu 1 Jul, 2010 07:44 am
@electronicmail,
I made a mistake, sorry, the 8 hours aren't to cross the diameter of this star. From NASA website "Assuming the upper size limit of 2100 solar radii, light would take more than 8 hours to travel around the star's circumference." Still VY Canis Majoris is the biggest star we know. I also found out the name is Latin for "Big Dog". Who knew astronomers have a sense of humor
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mark noble
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Thu 1 Jul, 2010 08:36 am
@electronicmail,
electronicmail wrote:
We're safe anyway until our sun gives up 5 billion years from now.
The guy on your link only made a back-of-the-envelope calculation. He doesn't even know if our own spiral arm will be in the direct path of the 2 galaxies' collision. Listen to him: he doesn't know because he was too lazy to make a proper calculation. Ignore his scary stuff, our sun will become a red dwarf before Andromeda's collision with our Milky Way can affect our own little solar system. A direct hit on our own spiral arm is extremely unlikely. And we're a long, long, way from the galactic center.
Quote:
The Earth's Solar System is located some 28,000 light years from the centre of the Milky Way. At that distance, the new measurements show that the galaxy is rotating at a speed of 965,600 km/h, compared to previous estimates of 804,672 km/h, the astronomers report.
I do admit, I'm not overly concerned by this, just thought you might find it interesting.
I personally believe (and I'm not a fatalist) that the integrity of modern society will be fractured beyond the point of repair within the next decade.
But I'm from wales, and this is to be expected apparently.
Well I'm an American and whatever your Welsh fatalistic disposition I can prove the guy on your video is wrong on the expected collision with Andromeda. He's off by a couple of billion years, it's going to be another 5 billion before that merger is complete. Our sun will die at about the same time so to our little neighborhood the merger won't make much difference http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/1533/massive-galactic-merger-largest-ever-pile
Quote:
Galaxy mergers are relatively common – many of the universe's large galaxies were formed when smaller galaxies collided in the first few billion years following the Big Bang. In five billion years, the Milky Way itself will combine with our neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, producing a slew of new stars.
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electronicmail
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Thu 1 Jul, 2010 10:36 am
@mark noble,
Excuse me but do you think you could combine the "kind regards" and "hi" and other such flourishes in a signature line? Then posters can ignore it while still reading your posts. No offense but this is a website. It's not A Tale of Two Cities. I understand you mean well but always having to skip over portions of posts gets annoying.
The man on the video wasn't Prof. Hawkins. Nor was that his calculation, so I think it's unfair to cite him as a source.
Yes, I don't want to have to see any prefatory or concluding remarks which I've no intention of reciprocating; that last one btw should have given you a clue. But I don't know how to edit them out without zeroeing out the whole post.
