Milky Way Is Twice the Size We Thought

Peter writes to tell us about a research group at the University of Sydney in Australia, who in the middle of some calculation wanted to check the numbers everybody uses for the thickness of our galaxy at the core. Using data available freely on the Internet and analyzing it in a spreadsheet, they discovered in a matter of hours that the Milky Way is 12,000 light years thick, vs. the 6,000 that had been the consensus number for some time.

Haha

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it comes with "%30 MORE!" now.

Hardly surprising

[oz1cz]

Obesity is everywhere.

Wikipedia says 1000

[Aaron Isotton]

Wikipedia says it's only 1000 light years thick.

Good or bad?

[The Ancients]

So I read the article (yeah, yeah - I know...I was bored) and I hope the spreadsheet software used wasn't Excel - we all know how well that counts.

Re:Good or bad?

[king-manic]

So I read the article (yeah, yeah - I know...I was bored) and I hope the spreadsheet software used wasn't Excel - we all know how well that counts.

You mean the radius of the galaxy isn't 65,535 light years?

Re:Wikipedia says 1000

[kryten_nl]

Quick, e-mail them! They'll have to retract their article.

Re:Hardly surprising

[thunrida]

I knew it was expanding, but I had no idea that is is so fast.

Re:Wikipedia says 1000

[rucs_hack]

But, but, Voyager only had to cross 70,000 light years to get home....

I mean, you're going to be saying Voyager wasn't real next...

As if..

In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Snickers is only about half the size

Re:Wikipedia says 1000

[supermari0]

holy astronomy! to the wikipedia edit page... dadadada dadadada!

What the F ?

[backslashdot]

Now you guys tell me!

What the Fudge man, I have been eating Snickers all this time thinking I'm getting more chocolate! Now I find this out?

First measurements were accurate

[Trogre]

What we're seeing now is middle age spread.

Re:Is this real information?

[SnowZero]

Is there any physical effect where a galaxy ends? Or are we just talking about an imaginary limit.

Yes, you pass a sign that says "Now leaving Milky Way galaxy, pop 13.167B". That is soon followed by a sign reading "Ejected star crossing, next 200,000 light years."

How hard is it to map the galaxy?

It's pretty easy actually; We draw the Earth, the rest of the solar system, a few constellations, and a whole lot of "here be dragons[1] (maybe)".

Where's the flaw in my logic?

Asking a serious question on slashdot. At night. Clearly.

[1] Now known to consist of dark matter and dark energy, which is why you can't see them.

Re:Wikipedia says 1000

[B3ryllium]

I'll need to hear that in triplicate before I believe it.

Re:A good reminder

[martin-boundary]

This reminds me of a famous politician who was mentioning WMD in a speech he was having written, and wanted to cite the original source where they were discovered in a certain country or other. He couldn't find it. No one else he talked to could either. It turns out that what was a common assumption (and turned out false) had never actually been verified. So he winged it.

WTF is light year

[jsse]

Use something a layman could understand OK?

Say, how many Library of Congress, or elephants, have we got here?

Re:WTF is light year

[kryten_nl]

1 light-year = 4 * (cost of war in Iraq so far) * (mile/$)

I hope that brings it into perspective for you ;)

This has MAJOR consequences...

[Linker3000]

...We are told that the sun's light takes approx 8 minutes to reach us, but now we know that the distance involved is twice as much so therefore the speed of light must be approximately double what we thought! ...if the moon is twice as far away as previously thought, how come astronauts have landed successfully - in theory, they should get 'there' and be in the middle of nowhere ...UNLESS, of course they never went....AH HA!!!

Re:Hardly surprising

[commodoresloat]

That's what happens when you eat too many Milky Ways

Monty Python was more accurate than NASA?

[Misanthrope]

        Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
        And things seem hard or tough,
        And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
        And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...

        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 universe.

        (Animated calliope interlude)

        The 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.

Re:Hardly surprising

[Hognoxious]

But they have a lightweight centre - it's the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite!

I reckon it's due to another metric/imperial cockup.

Re:Wikipedia says 1000

[Jesus_666]

Oh, that's already common knowledge - when NASA calculated the size of the galaxy, the reference data was in parsecs and the NASA engineer assumed that it was in terarods. Thus they're roughly 5/6 off mark.

Re:Wikipedia says 1000

[Neurotoxic666]

And don't forget to cite "kdawson, from Slashdot", as a reference. :)

Re:Other instances of numbers widely off

[ta bu shi da yu]

Given that Excel is so notoriously inaccurate when doing floating point calculations, I'd be interested if someone else did this in another application. I wonder if they would get the same result.

troll alert :D

[zero.kalvin]

So every time someone forget to divide by 2 , he is going to claim he came up with a major discovery ??

Re:Is this real information?

[kryten_nl]

42

Re:Other instances of numbers widely off

[ta bu shi da yu]

True. Article doesn't say what spreadsheet package he used.

The only way to find out would be to buy the journal article [ed.gov], thrillingly entitled "Modeling the Milky Way: Spreadsheet Science".

Re:Haha

[Guinness2702]

You're all wrong! It's a well known and established fact that the galaxy is sixteen thousand light years thick [lyricsdepot.com].

And you that that spam was a fraud

[outofoptions]

You really CAN get stuff on the net to double your size.

Re:Haha

[pha7boy]

I bet I can do cross it in 12 parsecs.

incre@se your Galaxy thickness!

[catdevnull]

***GUARANTEED increase your galaxy by 6,000 light years***
thick and sturdy clusters. ladies love dark matter. hawking beautiful einstein copernicus keppler cassini
jplab buzz lightyear wormhole

[sorry--I couldn't resist]

Re:Other instances of numbers widely off

[irenaeous]

Scientists never know anything to be "absolutely true". Absolute truth is the domain of charlatans, liars and cheats.

Are you absolutely sure that you are right? (i.e. you know an absolute truth.) And if you are when you say this, does that mean you are a charlatan, liar or cheat?

Damn it!

[fahrbot-bot]

Now I have to pack an extra suitcase.

Re:Other instances of numbers widely off

[kalirion]

I'm getting ########### myself.

Re:Other instances of numbers widely off

[spun]

Vitriol is the only thing that penetrates global warming deniers thick, simian skulls. Trying to reason with them is like trying to reason with a brain damaged baboon. All they can do is screech and fling feces. I'm perfectly capable of reasoned debate (and you're doing such a good job demonstrating your skill, too... :-P), as long as the other party is too. But there's no getting through to these people, their minds are made up, and no amount of evidence will sway them. This is because they are fundamentally selfish, narcissistic people who refuse to be held accountable for how their actions affect others. If they were to accept the truth about global warming, they might actually have to change their selfish, wasteful ways.

"Reasoned debate"? I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
Read my sig.

You're an arrogant little shit, aren't you?

Arrogant? Yes. A shit? Yes. But not little. Glad to have ticked you off.