Welcome To Laniakea, Our New Cosmic Home 67
astroengine writes Using a new mapping technique that takes into account the motions — and not just the distances — of nearby galaxies, astronomers discovered that the Milky Way is located in the suburb of a massive, previously unknown super-cluster they named Laniakea, a term from Hawaiian words meaning "immeasurable heaven." Actually, Laniakea's girth is measurable, though difficult to conceptualize. The super-cluster spans 520 million light-years in diameter, more than five times larger than the cluster previously believed to be the Milky Way's cosmic home.
A body in motion etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
So I get the idea of the new grouping. Some things we used to consider our neighbors, we're actually just flying past and have no long term connection to.
I get why that's useful. But I don't get why it'd replace our existing grouping. For a human lifespan, that grouping is all but permanent.
Re:A body in motion etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
It replaces the new grouping in much the same way Einstein replaced Newtonian mechanics. It is a more accurate description of our place in the universe, just as relativity is a more accurate description of moving bodies, even if on human scales the two are nearly indistinguishable.
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It replaces the new grouping in much the same way Einstein replaced Newtonian mechanics.
No it does not and that analogy is complete bullshit.
Don't waste your precious analogies on Slashdot; they'll only be torn to pieces.
Re:A body in motion etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
Analogies are never exact correspondences. They're simply more or less useful. People who replace 'useful' with 'accurate' in that sentence are like a clown car full of lawyers in a fruit flavored hailstorm.
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Don't waste your precious analogies on Slashdot; they'll only be torn to pieces.
Unless they're car analogies. Then they'll be driven into the ground.
Allow me: this new super cluster discovery is like finding out your car isn't just driving up the ramp of a semi trailer, but that the semi-trailer is on the deck of an air-craft carrier.
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Please don't mistake your inability to comprehend the basis of comparison in an analogy for a mistake in the analogy, TIA
What The Hell Is Wrong With You People? (Score:1)
A better analogy would be from switching from carburetors to fuel injection.
This is Slashdot. Car analogies, people. Car analogies.
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I realize you are an AC troll and this is way off topic. But it's apparent you don't know a damn thing about carburetors.
Obviously fuel injection is fantastic, and you'd only choose a carb over FI for specific reasons. But it's like comparing an HP scientific calculator to a Babbage engine. One is a very functional and practical solution using modern technology. The other is amazing tech from the past and frankly a mechanical marvel.
FI is going to look pretty silly when we're all driving around with Mr.
Cool Tech (Score:2)
Fuel injection will never look as cool as two high CFM Holley four barrel carbs sitting above an engine, in series with a blower plenum. Or six two-barrels. Never. :)
Just the same way my state of the art Marantz home theater will never look as cool as my late 1970's 2325 Marantz receiver.
A particular technology may be peak, performance wise; but that's no indicator it's the peak aesthetically as well.
Clipper ships / modern freighters. Another good example. Beauties and the beasts.
etc.
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Einstein didn't replace Newtonian mechanics? Tell that to the astronomers who conceived of Vulcan to explain Mercury's orbit.
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For non-relativistic calculations, Newtonian mechanics remain a useful set of formulas. Relativity didn't replace Newtonian mechanics so much as subsume it.
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If we were only thinking in terms of human lifespans, most science would be irrelevant. Geology and climatology? That stuff hardly changes in a human lifetime! Astronomy? Why bother with anything beyond Pluto?
Thinking within a human lifespan is very short sighted for anything but what you want to achieve before you die. You could even argue that the grouping is practically permanent for the lifespan of our species, but that grouping would still be technically wrong compared to our best knowledge.
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Bullshit on so many fronts.
Let's start with your mischarcterization of sciences, then go to your mischaracterization of my post.
Climatology affects a shit ton of day-to-day life. Absolutely 100% vital for modern agricultural planning, even setting asside that climate change is more immediate than you're giving it credit for. Geology is markedly relevant to anyone doing resource exploration, today, on top of its importance in seismology and vulcanology.
So that's bullshit #1. Those things do, in fact, have
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I wonder what time it really is based on this time scale.
Anyone has any idea?
'Musican (Score:4, Funny)
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Protip n00b: a post can only get so many mods of a specific type. Funny limit got hit, so people chose insightful, when they should have chosen underrated.
There goes the neighborhood. (Score:4, Funny)
Just 520M LY? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, that's less than 160 MegaParsecs. Not that much bigger than the already-cramped Virgo Supercluster at 33MPa. Still the name is quite nice.
LOL ... (Score:4, Funny)
Your momma so fat ...
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It's sad that this is probably one of the last places this kind of joke can be made, since Fark took the shit plunge.
Great (Score:2)
Just what we needed another taxing authority.
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Just through the door marked 'Beware of the Leopard'.
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Not only that. Now I have to have all my address labels reprinted!
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Not that massive (Score:3)
Al Gore warned about it. (Score:2)
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You know, if you keep building more and more high ways the cities will sprawl uncontrollably. Al Gore warned us about it back in 2000. (If he had not, he would have, I mean at least it is the sort of thing he would have warned about). Now we have sprawled to some 500 million light year diameter. When you face that impossibly long commute, remember that prophetic sage.
Al Gore is not a prophet
If a tree falls in a wood (Score:2)
What was I about to say? Oh - yes. And all this vast space with dark matter and dark energy and galaxies and gas and stars and planets. And if there's nothing intelligible there, nothing intelligent, no thought whatsoever. Just physical world, nohingness filled with the quiet and sometimnes not so quiet clockwork of time and physics and particles. Then us, we, here -- do we even exist?
It seems to make sense to me . . . (Score:3)
Not surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
You're not the only one to start thinking along these lines. You might be interested in this somewhat random and unrepresentative set of papers:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/... [arxiv.org]
http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4280 [arxiv.org]
http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.0552 [arxiv.org]
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.4688 [arxiv.org]
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.5554 [arxiv.org]
I know very little about this area myself but it seems relatively settled that the fractal dimension of the universe - if such can be defined and has a meaningful interpretation - is between 2.5 and 3.
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Thankfully for our aching heads, unless our understanding of the laws of physics is very wrong, probably not. The structure of the universe being fractal in nature doesn't imply that *everything* in reality is fractal -- it implies that gravity will tend to construct fractal structures, when dealing with objects in a large enough number. Down at our level, there's too much competition with other forces, primarily electromagnetic although on some Solar and planetary scale objects such as neutron stars the fo
Misplaced? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't click-open the article. Imagine if we slashdotted an entire Beowulf cluster of galaxies.
Seriously, though, how could we have missed that many nearby galaxies for so long? Did we not see them, underestimate their size, miscalculate their location or direction due to dust being in the way?
That's very large... (Score:1)
kinda puts it into perspective (Score:2)
..we go from 520 million light years in our local group to what? 46 billion light years of known universe, shy of 28 billion light years observable? If this new label represents a neighbourhood, then the universe is what, a small town?
Where's the difficulty in conceptualising?
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I grew up on a housing estate, I went to a school where I knew the names of every one of the other 740 students there and all 44 teachers. I knew where most of them lived as well - every one of them within two miles of my home. That four square miles was way more than a hundred square blocks (though you couldn't really refer to unplanned urban sprawl as being anything like "block"-y, it is certainly more than ten vehicle streets to a side).
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Thought someone moved in to my old hood (Score:2)
Land of Ikea? (Score:2)
We don't know anything (Score:1)