Always had a passing interest in astronomy, been watching Professor Brian Cox on BBC4, loved it; so i went to find out more. The scale of things is so infinitely mind boggling my heard hurts and I'm feeling slight.
That's what I learnt today.
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VY Canis Majoris, now my world is upside down
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Posted 1 year ago #
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Explain please.
I quite often boggle my own mind by thinking about stuff.
Posted 1 year ago # -
This one does it for me:
"... the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."
-- Carl Sagan (slightly misquoted)
To me this means two important things:
1) it is pretty likely we are not alone in the universe (though sadly we may never make contact)
2) God must have been really busy on that fourth day when he created the stars...Posted 1 year ago # -
Sand's more useful though, really.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Sand's more useful though, really.
Without sand I wouldn't be writing this (silicon).
Without our star we wouldn't exist.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Posted 1 year ago #
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VY Canis Majoris isn't the same as Sirius is it?
Sirius is small and close, VY CMa is big and far away (I think).
If you're having trouble comprehending it, just remember the wisdom of Father Ted...
Posted 1 year ago # -
Brian cox: awesome Physicist and populariser of science, and he was rather good in "The Bourne Identity" too
Posted 1 year ago # -
If
you're having trouble comprehending it, just remember the wisdom of Father Ted...
Don't. They tried telling me it was Gatwick, when all along it was Farnborough airport.
Posted 1 year ago # -
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 universeThe 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.Posted 1 year ago # -
Things can only get better...
Posted 1 year ago # -
Sand's more useful though, really.
No stars = No sand
Posted 1 year ago # -
Pollux!
(Giggles uncontrollably at the sheer mind-bogglingness of it all)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Betelgeuse is a bit of a big old mofo too, and easy to see because it's it's only about 640 light years away (though there's a high margin of error in that measurement).
Or to put it another way, the light we see from it tonight left it sometime in the 14th Century when our ancestors would have been dressed in rough smocks whilst standing on a riverbank and throwing turnips at a witch.
(This still happens in some parts of Fife.)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Check diss, and prepare to be even more emboggled:
Posted 1 year ago # -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0lxbzgwW7IHere is another.
Bleedin 'ell elfin, i'm off to drink something strong now.Posted 1 year ago # -
That's great eth3er only thing is I need to go to sleep now, & my mind will get annoyed at the petty stuff @ work compared to this.
Posted 1 year ago # -
And people think it all started with a small point that went kaboom.
Big Bang Bollocks.
Posted 1 year ago # -
And people think it all started with a small point that went kaboom.
If the universe is uniformly expanding everywhere and everything is (observably) getting further apart, then surely the idea that everything was once closer together, isn't really that hard to accept.
The only difficult bit is how close and what caused them to separate.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Yeah, but some tiny point with all the shit around us contained in it? And it just went fart. And 4 and whatever billion years later we've got all this sand? Yeah right.
Big
Bang
Bollocks.Complete bollocks.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Enough of all this flim flam... I'm gonna start believing in God, makes a lot more sense.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Well you can kinda understand why Einstein did, and Hawkins does.
Big Bang my arse.
I saw two cars going away from one another. Only thing was, they passed one another on the motorway, sofor a second they were really close together. But they started out further apart.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Advance a view DD. Saying ************ isn't intelligent discourse, lets pretend were are mature.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Next thing DD you'll be saying evolution is wrong.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Yeah, but some tiny point with all the shit around us contained in it?
I'm not sure that it is a "tiny point" like the head of a pin. We don't really have the foggiest notion of what it might have been like before the Planck epoch as we don't understand enough about quantum physics yet.
It only starts from a "singularity with infinite density" if we ignore quantum gravity. There may be other explanations once we understand that.
Point is, it is a working model, one that the brightest people in the world more or less agree on and can make observations that fit with it.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Why should I advance a view?
So everything, all this wonderment of stars and planets and stuff just came from a pinhead? Lolcopters.
Get the bejesus outta here
All because some physicists can't really understand...
Posted 1 year ago # -
Bleedin 'ell elfin
I now, mad, in't it?
Whenever I get going on a good mind-boggling sesh, all these petty arguments of is there/isn't there a god/s just fade into insignificance.
If that's the case, and all these things are so vast and we're on one teeny tiny speck of dust in the whole scale of things, I don't think it really matters what we think. Therefore just think what you like, if it makes you happy and gives you some sense of meaning to things.
Posted 1 year ago # -
I'm cool with evolution. I like that it gets things wrong sometimes. Right now, I've got a spot on my chin caused by my skin deciding to reject a bristle that turned back 180 degrees on itself only a mm or so away from where it started. And yesterday, I, a supposedly highly evolved human, bit my tongue. Intelligent design my arse.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Graham, what do you do? I'm only asking as you seem to have rather brilliant knowledge and may just become my 6th favorite person. I am really interested in knowing a more about our galaxies.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Planck Epoch...
I notice the phrase:
it is believed
Posted 1 year ago # -
So everything, all this wonderment of stars and planets and stuff just came from a pinhead? Lolcopters.
Is one possible explanation. Though "pinhead" is a difficult measurement because it is "infinitely dense" and space-time is distorted beyond our comprehension so its dimensions are meaningless.
Black holes are observable and show similar properties: they are thought to contain a gravitational singularity where space-time curvature is infinite.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Graham, what do you do?
I google a lot
Posted 1 year ago # -
I'm waiting for DD to expound his theory on how the universe started. It seems like he subscribes to the 'steady state' theory. Which is fine, but doesn't really explain all the background radio noise, or how come everything is red shifting. Come on DD, let's hear it.
Posted 1 year ago # -
I notice the phrase:
it is believed
Yes, that's how scientific models work. I doubt many credible scientists would say "it is a known fact" for anything around the big bang. All they can say is "we have this theory, based on our understanding of the laws of physics, which appears to be supported by this evidence"
If you want more definitive answers than that then try a church
Posted 1 year ago # -
I'm going shopping for a telescope tomorrow so I can get a better look at all this crazy shit.
Really, I am. Except, I won't be going anywhere near a shop. Instead I'll press some keys on my wireless keyboard and click my wireless mouse and some electromagnetic perturbations will be transmitted across my wireless network and one will arrive at my house a few days later.
Except it won't, because all the wonders of the universe and the brave, pioneering spirit of our Earth-bound scientists can still be brought sharply into check by the banal hopelessness of our postal system and I'll have to trudge over to a delivery depot on the outskirts of Livingston or Glenrothes and wait whilst an short, aggressive man ignores me for an hour before wresting a muddied card from my hand, sighing loudly and grunting at one of his fellow dementors who will deliver a sorry, broken package to my hands and rendering all the wonders above me forever mute and dark.
Perhaps I should just side with deadlydarcy. It's easier that way, isn't it?
Posted 1 year ago #
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