Cosmologists Find Eleven Runaway Galaxies 60
An anonymous reader writes: Discovery News reports that 11 homeless galaxies have been identified by Igor Chilingarian, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Moscow State University, and his fellow astronomers. "The 11 runaway galaxies were found by chance while Chilingarian and co-investigator Ivan Zolotukhin, of the L'Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie and Moscow State University, were scouring publicly-available data (via the Virtual Observatory) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the GALEX satellite for compact elliptical galaxies."
Homeless galaxies (Score:5, Funny)
I guess the government needs to do something about this
Re:Homeless galaxies (Score:5, Funny)
The rich clusters are getting richer, hogging all the hydrogen gas. Trickle-down hydrogen is not working.
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If they're runaways, they have homes, they just choose not to live there.
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The problem is, the parent Universe doesn't care about those runaway galaxies.
Won't somebody think of the runaway galaxies?
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There's another possibility! (Score:1)
They could be bride galaxies who were about to marry the boy their parents expected them to. However at the last minute these runaway galaxies realized that there was another boy galaxy who could really make them happy, if only given the chance!
Oh, so romantic...
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Actually, using a "runaway galaxy" as a mode of space travel solves a lot of issues. Steering is kinda imprecise, though, and you can forget about brakes.
Re: Homeless galaxies (Score:1)
All this talk of homeless galaxies. These are simply " undocumented galaxies". We should be encouraging them to apply for a "path to legal Galaxy status". Just because they are outside of our arbitrary boundaries doesent mean they are any less of a legal Galaxy. We should come up with an amnesty program to bring all of these undocumented galaxies within our borders.
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The answer to that would be, 'er', yes. It indicates that astronomical motions are for more chaotic than imagined and hence as you go down from large to small so that chaos would reflect in more errant objects. So yeah, we can quite readily be impacted by dangerous objects at any time and it behoves us to try to do something about reducing risk, the smaller the objects the more prevalent they and the greater the risk of impact. So finding high risk objects and reducing that risk. It's like the the stupid,
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I guess the government needs to do something about this
There ought to be a law!
times smaller,,, (Score:1, Offtopic)
which are approximately 1,000 times smaller than our galaxy
Does this mean 1/1000th the size of our galaxy? "Times smaller", "times less" and their ilk are terrible phrases.
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When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes ... we can guess that part of what's meant is, "The new battery is a tenth the size of the old battery."
Except you're not guessing. There is no confusion that it might mean something else. You've seen this pattern dozens, if not hundreds of times before, and it always means the same thing.
The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication.
Yes, English has many nuanced words, but smaller is not one of them. It means comparatively small. It is one of the more basic and common words, and has a simple meaning.
you're communicating that the old battery is small,
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds,"
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There is no confusion that it might mean something else.
Yes, there IS confusion. Are we supposed to infer that the thing that the new 10-times-smaller version is being compared to was already considered small? That's what implied, but nobody knows for sure because the person saying it is lazily using a common, and poorly thought out, construction that doesn't actually tell us that.
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
OK. But let's say you don't know how big the Small Magellanic Cloud is, relative to, say, the Milky Way, or Andromeda, or anything else. And then someone says, "We've just found a ne
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A is ten times smaller than B
So what you're saying is, "B is already small, and A is even smaller."
Right?
Are you presuming that someone already understands B to be considered small? What is B small compared to?
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Saying that something is "ten times smaller" is like saying "ten times more small." The phrase "ten times" is a multiplier. It means that you're describing an aspect of something, and saying that there is ten times as much of that aspect. In that usage
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So what you're saying is, "B is already small, and A is even smaller."
No. The phrase "A is ten times smaller than B" is equivalent to the statement SizeA = 0.1 * SizeB. There is nothing in there constraining SizeA or SizeB relative to anything else, just the size relative to each other.
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There is nothing in there constraining SizeA or SizeB relative to anything else, just the size relative to each other.
No, no constraints in that sense. Just the larger constraints introduced by the fact that the purpose of saying anything at all, in that context, is to communicate something meaningful about A's size. And by choosing the "ten times more" construction, part of what you're communicating is the fact that B, the thing to which you're comparing A, is by implication already considered small. That format (rather than saying, "A is a tenth B's size") is a choice of words that communicates the understand that B is
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Man, I'm not even any of those other AC's, but you need to let it go or learn english. So you had to look up some common knowledge - everyone has a brain fart once in awhile, but all you're proving here is that either:
a) you're intellect is ten times smaller than the average persons
or
b) the average persons ego is ten times smaller than yours.
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What's so hard to understand? This forum is full of people correcting others' poor use of communication when talking about everything from natural selection to global warming to emp
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Just like every time someone says, "Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B," I have to guess that, "Product B is $2 more than Product A." Maybe we shouldn't have slept through math class.
Math doesn't help in the absence of context. If Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B, but Product B costs $10,000 ... does it really matter? That's a little different than Product B costing $3, right? Right. In real life, context actually matters, or you're just wasting people's time.
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That has nothing to do with the wording people are arguing over
No, that's EXACTLY what people are arguing about. You say "A is ten times smaller than B" when B is already understood to be small compared to something else. The implication in that sentence is that B is already known for its smallness, and A is even smaller. Except, people use that same construction even when B isn't considered small. They use that incorrect connotation when what they're really trying to say is, "B is big, but A is only a tenth as big."
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Is English your 23rd language or something? Did you fail every lesson related to logic? Did you sleep through every language class? Your arguments make no sense to an English speaker. Perhaps you should learn the language before you criticise how others use it.
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Wait, why would that be confusing?
1000 times larger is : size times 1000
1000 times smaller is : size times 1 / 1000
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No, it's not. 1000 times larger is size times 1001.
And OMG IT MATTERS! (Score:5, Funny)
Until now I hadn't realized that there are actually people out there RIGHT THIS MINUTE who are several times more bored than I am. (Not, upon pain of death, to be confused with "several times as bored", or, God forbid, "several times less interested".
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Wait, why would that be confusing?
It's not confusing, it's illogical.
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One of the things that always bothered me about this is the ambiguity of the approximation as well. Two interpretations:
More than 500 times but less than 1500 times, using the interpretation Parent suggests, suggests ratios of 0.00067-0.00200.
More than a ratio of 0.0005 but less than a ratio of 0.0015, suggests 667-2000 times.
How much overlap is there between these two ranges? 55.5% (667-1500) of the total range (500-2000) is overlap. The same is true for writing it as ratios: the range from 0.00067-0.00150
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"Times smaller", "times less" and their ilk are terrible phrases.
I agree - but if i ever express that, nobody understands the problem. I'm glad i'm not the only weird one!
The issue is how small is it to start with? We can easily express how large something is - there are units for that - but there are no units for smallness. So if thing A is 10 times smaller than thing B, how small is thing B? You can tell me how big it is, but you can't tell me how small it is.
Yeah, we all know what it means - but that doesn't make the illogicalness of it grate any less.
Runaway galaxies? (Score:2)
The man who needs to know about this (Score:2)
The LTDs (Score:4, Informative)
The "Runaway Galaxies" was the name of my garage band in the 70s.
Headline Creep (Score:2)
SMH (Score:2)
Fuck.
Now we have to give the homeless planets (mostly the dark planets) some sort of EBT so they have enough weed money left, after the rent, to go to the Littel-Wayn-eVerse..