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]

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?

[Bobhouse]

http://anywherebb.com/noctis.html
Just in case you want to visit those stars.

[Kamog]

I don't understand galaxies. Especially elliptical ones. I can sort of see how a spiral galaxy works, it rotates around so the spiral arms orbit around the center and the rotation and the gravitational pull towards the center balance each other out. So the galaxy doesn't collapse or fly apart.

So why doesn't an elliptical galaxy collapse under its own gravity? If it's spinning, that will stop it from collapsing in the plane of rotation but not at right angles to the rotation.

Also, I wonder how a barred spiral galaxy can form. What happened when the galaxy was forming? The bars full of stars extended outwards from the middle, straight, in opposite directions, and then after the bars grew to a certain length, the whole galaxy started to rotate so that the arms bent into a spiral? How can that happen, I just don't understand!

[Fyron]

I believe that all rotating objects and all orbital paths are elliptical. The earth, the sun, the earth's orbit around the sun, everything. It has something to do with off-center focal points and centers of mass, but I can't remember it just now... And plenty of wobbling.