Milky Way Is Square(ish), According To New Map 123
KentuckyFC writes "The structure of the Milky Way is notoriously difficult to work out because we see our galaxy edge on. That means nearer clouds and stars are superimposed on more distant ones and telling them apart is hard. However, astronomers have unveiled a new map based on velocity measurements made on 870 clouds of carbon monosulphide. This has revealed a number of new features of the Milky Way including a previously unknown spiral arm, some 30,000 light years from the galactic core. But the most surprising finding is that some of our galaxy's spiral arms are straight rather than curved, giving the Milky Way a distinctly square look. That's not quite as outrageous as it sounds. Astronomers know of a number of other galaxies with straight arms, such as the pinwheel galaxy M101. So ours probably looks something like this."
Ohhhhhhhhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sadly, this was pretty much along the lines of my first thoughts when I read the headline as well.
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Well, I've got to say one thing: at least the mods were smart enough to not recognize this as Funny.
I only wish I was smart enough to figure out why they did give it an Insightful mod. Doesn't that directly contradict the poll results about how the average Slashdotter is smarter than average?
Go figger.
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Insightful is the funny mod - funny mod then again means "+1, groan-inducing".
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Re:Ohhhhhhhhhh (Score:5, Funny)
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- Dan.
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But will you?
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My God, it's full of stars! (Score:2)
But hey, I am not 100,000 light years away to make that kind of judgement.
Here is a nice photo of the Milky Way [wikimedia.org] just for fun...
Re:My God, it's full of stars! (Score:5, Funny)
But hey, I am not 100,000 light years away to make that kind of judgment.
I am. It is why I can never get first post.
Re:My God, it's full of stars! (Score:4, Funny)
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It is an octagon. In fact, it's The Octagon.
A billion stars go in. One comes out!
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Honestly, looks more like a circle/square - an Octagon to me.
But hey, I am not 100,000 light years away to make that kind of judgement.
Here is a nice photo of the Milky Way [wikimedia.org] just for fun...
Looks more like a swastika to me. Who knew God was a NAZI.
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Or maybe he is Hindu, which would make more sense... however little sense that makes.
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Nah. Nazi makes more sense. For his "chosen people", god sure did fuck around with the Jews.
Kind of like when a house cat finds a grasshopper--instead of just indulging its predatory instincts by eating it and ending its misery, the cat better enjoys bringing it inside, picking off its legs, batting it around, etc.
Re:My God, it's full of stars! (hic) I mean jars! (Score:2)
Or maybe he is Hindu, which would make more sense.
Or celtic. It looks a bit more like the celtic 3-armed swastika than the hindu 4-armed version. At least, it looks that way if I drink enough poteen...
On a side note, did any culture make a 5-armed version?
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The picture in TFA is misleading -- it isn't of the Milky Way, but of M101, the same galaxy (and picture) as in the second link.
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That's not a picture of the Milky Way (all our pictures of the MW look like a fuzzy UFO).
It's M101, aka the Pinwheel Galaxy [wikipedia.org].
In other words, the Milky Way is still square-ish, even though that picture is octogon-ish.
God only knows why they didn't put a caption under it.
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Warning, that's an extremely large image.
Not that I'm sizeist :)
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Milky Way (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought it was brown, about 4 inches long, and had a swirled pattern on top of it...
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Meh, it's probably too sweet.
When are they going to find the Milky Way Dark galaxy? That's what I want to know!
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Misleading article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Misleading article (Score:5, Funny)
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http://galaxymap.org/drupal/node/171 [galaxymap.org]
A quick Google search reveals some renderings of the Milky Way, compiling various theories. One of the illustrations has squarish features, but I can't find the "new map" that the article claims was supposedly released.
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Near as I can tell, that's because the authors haven't actually published a rendering. Here's their original paper [arxiv.org] (PDF). It contains lots of graphs of spirals and curves, but no pretty pictures for us illiterates.
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You insensitive clod (Score:1, Funny)
The article has a picture of a galaxy with no caption. A casual reader will assume the picture is of our own galaxy, but it is actually a picture of M101.
M101 is my own galaxy!
Quickly ejected material (Score:2, Interesting)
Note that the straight areas are orthogonal to the center and then begin their rotational curve somewhat further out. This implies that the material in those arms was ejected at a greater speed than the arms closer in. It also means that those arms are younger than others since the straight areas have not had time to settle into a standard curved shape.
Pretty cool stuff, /.
Re:Quickly ejected material (Score:5, Informative)
Galactic arms aren't ejected from the core. They're just waves of star formation. They appear bright because they have more young, bright stars than the areas between arms.
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BadAnalogyGuy long ago morphed into simply BadPostGuy.
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Let's be honest. Slashdot doesn't really have a need for a dedicated "bad analogy guy". There are so many people here who do a great job at it everyday for free. A "bad post guy" is also redundant, for the most part.
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Sure but the analogies were deliberately and amusingly bad, which can't be said for most bad analogies or for that matter the just plain bad posts like the OP. I can understand getting tired of doing the shtick, that's fine, I'm just saying the transition to being just yourself hasn't been a positive one from my point of view.
Square-shaped (Score:1)
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The Milky Way is a Nazi!
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Did monoglith do it, or was it Mr. Godwin?
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Wait, does that mean we lose automatically, and that I for one should welcome our new Andromedan overlords?
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A Barred spiral (Score:5, Informative)
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Given that it's the Milky Way, they should've figured that square bars would come into it somewhere. I'm anticipating white fluffy stuff and/or nougat in the core depending on where the discoveries are made.
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My only comment is that it does probably look something like M101, right up until somebody discovers something else that makes it look like a dodecahedron...I just like saying dodecahedron
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Great, going into the direction of one ancient symbol, still popular in large parts of Asia but somewhat infamous for the last half a century in our cultural sphere...
(maybe not that strange though - one of the hypotheses is that galaxies, in the times when it was still possible to see them without light pollution, are what inspired it)
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I've seen M31 (Andromeda) with the naked eye, and it certainly didn't make me think of a swastika - more a smudge.
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Or maybe that was supposed to be some peculiar comet that got nearby Earth in ancient times? Anyway, doesn't stop it from being funny / weird / complicated in the future, when we have long-duration photographs... (when the spiral structure of Andromeda isn't very apparent anyway)
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That only references the core of the galaxy, not the shape of the spiral arms. The picture itself is just an artist's representation (unlike the article, which is a picture of a completely different galaxy).
New Theme Song (Score:1)
Bizarro Galaxy (Score:4, Informative)
I think I've seen this kind of thing before... squares and octagons instead of circles and elipses. That's right, it was in Superman comics I read as a kid. We live in the Bizarro Galaxy.
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That explains so much.
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I think I've seen this kind of thing before... squares and octagons instead of circles and elipses. That's right, it was in Superman comics I read as a kid. We live in the Bizarro Galaxy.
That would explain the slashdot story about Apple's text filtering patent and all anyone was commenting on was parenting skills...
Not news (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes news. (Score:5, Informative)
No, the article is not describing a barred spiral galaxy. A barred spiral [wikipedia.org] is one where there is a strong bar of stars across the galactic core (and extending well beyond it), and then "normal" spiral arms extend outward (mostly) from the two ends of the bar. The Milkyway is indeed thought to be a barred spiral.
What the article is describing is a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms themselves are straight in parts. And yes these have been observed (as shown in TFA where the Pinwheel galaxy is pictured, notice the lack of a central bar), but no it was not as far as I know theorized that the Milkyway had such a structure until now. Thus, news.
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No, the article is not describing a barred spiral galaxy. A barred spiral is one where there is a strong bar of stars across the galactic core
I think we now have a pretty good idea that at the galactic core is Steve [nocookie.net].
I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
At last (Score:1)
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More like Osmos [hemispheregames.com]
Begin mapping (Score:2)
Alrighty, well this will make divvying up the galaxy into quadrants. I recommend a simple naming scheme: Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma. Umm... I'm not sure where the Neutral Zone should go.
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Ummmm ... isn't the Neutral Zone still in the Alpha quadrant?
That should cover the Federation, Cardassians, Romulans and Klingons at least, no? It's not like it's "somewhere else", it's just a buffer zone between people already in the Alpha Quadrant.
as long (Score:2)
as long as it's not a rhombus.
www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/9/
No, they have it wrong... (Score:1)
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Um, it is flat. While it has three dimensions, the spin causes most of the mass to be distributed at a plane, much like a hand-tossed Pizza.
See (*points*) here: we live right next to this piece of mushroom near the edge.
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Re:No, they have it wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, the description of "squarish", much like the description "spiral", is referring to the 2D face-on structure. Most people would be comfortable describing something 50 times larger in two dimensions than in the 3rd as flat, and it doesn't matter which way is "up" (though the galactic axis does give a valid reference for "north" and "south). A flat disk is a flat disk regardless of its orientation. Also if you require everything to line up exactly then essentially nothing is flat -- not Kansas and not your table top. On the scale of the galaxy, and in a context where we're calling the 2D shape "square", "flat" is an apt enough description.
"Cube", however, is just plain fucking wrong. Pointless pedantry is just a way for a weak-minded person to try to sound smart by being literal when they can't sound smart by knowing what they're talking about. And you still failed at that.
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Insane theories 1, regular theories like a million.
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They already think that space is a large chunk of fabric with giant marbles on it...
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They already think that space is a large chunk of fabric with giant marbles on it...
Giant marbles? More like tiny grains of sand that happen to also be fusion reactors with dust grains in the sand grains' orbits. Compared to galaxies, stars are tiny. Compared to the universe, galaxies are tiny.
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Every experiment/example I've seen to explain Einstein's Space-Time theory has involved a large sheet of fabric with giant balls being pushed around.
Tiny grains of sand and dust would make for bad television.
Words without Story (or Pictures!) (Score:5, Informative)
First off, the photo in the article is of the M101 Pinwheel Galaxy, not the Milky Way. Misleading, especially when you have to read all the way down to find out that tidbit and when the title includes 'New Map' we want to see the new map.
Secondly, we've known for quite some time that the Milky Way isn't a classic spiral. This Article gives a pretty interesting breakdown plus actual pictures [galaxymap.org].
How do lines of stars stay straight? (Score:2)
My physics intuition (which unsurprisingly probably doesn't work well on things the size of galaxies) tells me that even if I magically started with a straight-line structure, it would immediately start to become curved, as the closer-to-the-center stars orbit faster than the further out ones. No? How can these straight structures exist? And yeah, now that I think of it, that goes for "bar" galaxies too. WTF?
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Now that i think of it, central bars aren't necessarily crazy, provided they aren't "spinning," but instead, the stars are just moving toward or away from the center. But that's not what really happens, is it?
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I'm still not convinced that it's a bar as much as it's two large clusters on opposite sides of the center that are "throwing off the measurements." I can only speculate though.
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First, the galaxy doesn't work like the solar system - the orbital velocity of stars doesn't depend strongly on their distance from the centre.
Second, the arms aren't believed to be persistent structures formed from individual stars but density waves that cause increased star formation where they pass. So the arms appear to be very distinct because they have more young, bright stars in them while the space between arms is more older, dimmer stars.
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density waves
Care to expand on what these are? Thanks!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_wave_theory [wikipedia.org]
It's a nice writeup, with some good figures.
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You do realize it takes billions of years for gravity to make any changes at these distances right?
They can "stay straight" for longer than our planets existence and still ultimately be smoothed out.
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o, and by not going to those "bar" galaxies...
Not squarish to my eye (Score:2, Informative)
Minecraft Compatible (Score:3, Insightful)
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Now we know (Score:1)
Now we know why no extresstrial civilization has made contact with us. We are the nerdy square sitting in the corner at the dance, with a pocket protector full of pencils.
where is the stargate map? (Score:2)
where is the stargate map?
Shaped like a... (Score:1)
Swastika, then???
OMG the ancients were right!
So it looks like a swastika? (Score:2, Funny)
Suspected as much. (Score:4, Funny)
Arms to Armas (Score:2)
"Astronomers know of a number of other galaxies with straight arms, such as the pinwheel galaxy M101. So ours probably looks something like this."
Astronomers know of spirals and barred spirals. TFA says SOME of the arms are straight. There aren't many 'both' spirals. Most likely the different shapes of arms represent this galaxy's original arms and those of the galaxy it absorbed, in which our sun originated. Compared to the problems of evolving differently shaped arms, this is the simpler explanation, and
Ah, the Milky Way. (Score:3, Funny)
Too late (Score:1)
Wait, what? (Score:2)
So basically, our galaxy is rendered in a 3d skybox [wikipedia.org]?
Hey God! 1999 called...
LOL
Slashdot has received a detailed explanation ???? (Score:1)
Giant turtle theory (Score:1)
I thought our world was carried through space on giant turtle. More specifically, the world rests on four great elephants standing on the giant turtle. The giant turtle just swims happily through space. The astrozoologists are still trying to figure out the details.