OT: Lost in the Galaxy? No wonder.

[cshank2]

Turns out the Milky Way isn't a Spiral galaxy, it's a Barred Spiral! Hoorah.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...milky_way.html

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Oh my God..... So they actually know that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy? I've been telling people that we don't know squat about the center of the galaxy for years now, and now it appears that we are not only part of the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole, but that there is a bar - a bar of ancient red supergiants near what is apparently the event horizon?

Oh my God. So..... if we have evolved on a world orbiting a star in the accretion disk - accretion disk - of a black hole, then wouldn't that mean that other spiral galaxies - and I use that term lightly now - are merely accretion disks? And what about non-spiral galaxies, like the Magellanic Clouds?

I think my brain has just burnt out.

[Ed Kolis]

You think THAT's weird? Well, humans (as well as pretty much everything alive except bacteria) are really symbiotic organisms, much like the CueCappa - but not on the organismic level, but on the CELLULAR Level - about a billion years ago, some protozoa decided to absorb these other protozoa with whom they had this symbiotic relationship - we now call those second set of protozoa "mitochondria" and "chloroplasts"!
Well OK, maybe the galaxy stuff IS more impressive... "bar of ancient red supergiants" sounds almost like something you'd find in a vault in Angband, too

[Renegade 13]

No problem at all, I love talking about stuff like that But bear in mind, it might be partly wrong!

[Karibu]

What makes things more interesting, the matter we see is only smaller part of the matter of the galaxy. Dark matter is unseen matter, which has about 10 times more mass in our own galaxy than we have matter we can see.

A quotation from Wikipedia article:

For comparison, the Milky Way is believed to have roughly 10 times as much dark matter as ordinary matter.

For those who say it is/may be untrue: This same conclusion about dark matter you can make from various different places in the internet, including BBC site and Berkeley university.

[Renegade 13]

I love astronomy. Look at all the fascinating things you learn!

Dark matter is still, technically, a theory, but it is a theory that is nearly universally accepted today. There simply isn't enough baryonic ("normal") matter to account for all the gravitational effects we observe. If the visible matter was the only stuff there was, the large scale structures would not/could not exist, since the gravity required for them to form and stay formed simply would not be present. By the way, large scale in this context means larger than the solar system. Without dark matter, structures like galaxy clusters and superclusters wouldn't exist, even galaxies may not have enough gravity to stay together.

Scientists recently discovered a particle that makes up part of dark matter; neutrinos. Neutrinos are a by-product of nuclear fusion, among other things I'm certain, and so are hugely abundant. However, until recently, scientists didn't think they had any mass at all, that they were a "massless" particle. However, they recently have determined the mass, which although it is vanishingly small, it does exist. Neutrinos do make up a percentage of dark matter, but it is a quite small percentage.

Another candidate for dark matter is the Higgs Boson particle. This one hasn't even been detected, only theorized. But if it does exist, it should account for a large portion of dark matter, since it would have a large mass. Higgs Boson Link The Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that is, I think, already under construction at CERN, should prove or disprove the existance of the Higgs.

Things get a lot more strange however, when you think of things like dark energy, a theoretic form of energy that is sort of "anti-gravitational", and so is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. It appears dark energy rules the vast inter-galactic spaces, and gravity rules the on the galactic scale. In other words, dark energy is powerful enough to continue to force galaxies apart from one another, but not powerful enough to rend the galaxies apart.

Scientists now predict that "normal" baryonic matter, of which you and I are all made, composes merely 4 or 5% of the universe. Dark matter, either baryonic dark matter, or hot/cold dark matter makes up another 25%, with dark energy taking the other 70%. Dark Energy Link

But I'm sure I've totally gone beyond the point of interest here, so I'll shut up And I just realized most of what I said about dark matter is already in the link Karibu posted But hopefully the links I provided are interesting

[Renegade 13]

Ahhh, but did you know that the Milky Way may in fact be twice as large in diameter as originally thought? Up to 200,000 light years, or if you prefer more familiar measurements, 2.0 x 10^18 km across?

Here's the article I read that in: Astronomy.com link

This finding has implications closer to home. Our Milky Way Galaxy could be much larger than its existing estimate of 100,000 light-years.

"Our galaxy is much more massive and brighter than NGC 300, so on this basis, our galaxy is also probably much larger than we previously thought � perhaps as much as 200,000 light-years across," explains Joss Bland-Hawthorn, chief author of the team's paper.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

*fizzle*

[Renegade 13]

Which is not what you want your nuclear bomb to do.

[EvilGenius4ABetterTomorro]

The Bar of Ancient Red Super Giants! What time is Happy Hour?
And we're actually made up of many individual living things that take my DNA? Think they would like a drink too?