The structure of the Milky Way | Hacker News Reader

The structure of the Milky Way

phys.org

65 pointsdnetesn21 comments

Is the text in the pictures German? Or do they localize the pictures?

Either way, one thing about astronomy I find really fascinating is how people are able to figure out so much from so little data[0]. The amount of head scratching and the number of sleepless nights spent trying to make sense of what little data is available must be almost as mind-bending as the stellar bodies astronomers study.

[0] "little" compared to what we could gather if we could just hop aboard the good old Enterprise and jet over to a couple of nearby stars, or at least take a quick field trip to Neptune...

Well, we have taken a couple of field trips to Neptune (and a bit beyond), but your point is well taken. It really is extraordinary how much the human mind can encompass.

https://futurism.com/earth-compared-to-the-universe/

http://thirdmonk.net/lifestyle/our-sun-compared-to-the-large...

Well, yes, but we sent probes to Jupiter and Saturn that spent years exploring them and their moons.

And I would really like to know why Uranus' axis of rotation and its magnetic field are so weird. Wouldn't you?

Oh, I see, you want Neptune and Uranus orbiters. That's not what I thought you meant when you said "quick field trip to Neptune."

Yeah, I'd love to have those orbiters. And a Europa lander. And a pony.

But I'll settle for getting the damn Webb launched.

Well, if we could board a shuttle and arrive at a stable orbit around Uranus or Neptuine in less than 12 hours, we would not need an orbiter, would we?

In the short term, if Webb got launched, that would be awesome. But in the slightly-longer term, there is so much about Uranus and Neptune to discover, and we haven't done anything on that front.

Just consider how much we discovered by sending probes to Jupiter and Saturn. Consider, how there is still to discover on Uranus and Neptune. And tell me you don't want to go there really badly.

> Is the text in the pictures German?

It's in German for me too

"Sonne" -> "Sun"

"Galaktische Scheibe" -> "galactic disc"

"Bulge" -> "bulge"

I am a native German speaker, but thanks! :)

I just find it curious they would use images with German words on an English-speaking website.

What amazes me is how information-dense the universe is. We’re able to do a lot with a little data because we can extract so much information from it.

it was english for me, but badly translated

Yep. This sentence in the first photo caption caught me off guard...

"The Milky Way system, called galaxis, resembles a gigantic spiral with an estimated 200 billion stars. One of them is our sun."

I've been an avid astronomy nerd since I was 5 (and I'm almost ten times that age now) and never heard the term "galaxis". The only reference I could find on Google was to the highly acclaimed movie of that name:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113140/

Now I realize they just didn't translate the word "galaxy" when they translated the text to English.

I think "galaxis" is the ancient latin term. Either way, the word "galaxy" is derived from ancient greek and "milky way" is an almost literal translation.

I'm honestly surprised how we're enable to determine the shape of our galaxy while being inside it. That must be some crazy level of math going on.

Put it that it does not seem so hard: can you determine the shape of a mostly transparent house that you are currently in?

As usual, phys.org takes over your CPU.

Why is this even permitted? It should be blackholed

It's not bad on my computer, but then again, I run with a good adblocker enabled by default.

To their credit, site runs fine with javascript disabled.

This article reminds me a lot of the book "A Fire upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge.

While reading this article and viewing the diagram of the Milky Way, I wondered, does time pass more slowly from the point of view of those bodies near the center of the galaxy, which are moving more quickly?

Of course the faster you go the slower time passes but you have to travel at least 30% the speed of light to make a dramatic difference. See the table here:

http://www.emc2-explained.info/Time-Dilation-at-Low-Speeds/

Also: the star with the shortest known period orbiting our central black hole travels no faster than 1% the speed of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S0%E2%80%93102

Peak stellar speed observed as "nearly 3% the speed of light":

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05825-3

which appears to be rounded up from actual 2.55% value:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2_(star)#May_2018_pericentre_...

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