Space the final frontier

Lunaticsamurai

Lunaticsamurai

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ok, so after my other thread i have decided to create another one, this time leaving out religion and politics; So to carry on from the other thread, if there are any space/time travel geeks out there, then this is the thread for you.

One mention of religion and i'll ban myself :razz: :nono:

I actually worked this out quite a few years ago...

Our galaxy, the milky way is 100.000 light years across, from edge to edge, (1 light year equals how far light can travel in one direction in 1 year and light travels at 186.000 miles a second, for those that don't know) Our nearest neighbouring galaxy is Andromeda which is 2.2 million light years away.
Now if you scale our Galaxy down to 1 inch then Andromeda would be over 1 mile away.


In the image below you will see a diagram of roughly what our galaxy is like and position of us in it, for scale purposes, the point that shows our sun is our entire solar system included in that little dot.


5571568167_9fd66048c2.jpg



5571616647_01332c1fcc.jpg


Took me about 4 days to work that out, scaling everything down.


Now imagine that the edge of the known universe is roughly 13 billion light years away... thats a big place.


Tenubracon

Anyhoo! ... Back to space stuff before it gets locked

If our Solar System was the size of a CD then our Galaxy the Milky Way would be about the size of the Earth
Click to expand...

And how big would a crunchie be?


Splog


Originally Posted by Lunaticsamurai
I actually worked this out quite a few years ago...

Our galaxy, the milky way is 100.000 light years across, from edge to edge, (1 light year equals how far light can travel in one direction in 1 year and light travels at 186.000 miles a second, for those that don't know) Our nearest neighbouring galaxy is Andromeda which is 2.2 million light years away.

Now if you scale our Galaxy down to 1 inch then Andromeda would be over 1 mile away.



Took me about 4 days to work that out, scaling everything down.


Now imagine that the edge of the known universe is roughly 13 billion light years away... thats a big place.
Click to expand...


Oooops, back to the calculator SOL 186,300 per second ... Andromeda 2.5 million LYs ..
 
Oooooh, so, so tempting.............;)
 
On the first day..................

It was decided that it was Turtles all the way down.
 
Amazing, just imagine all that happening by chance :D

So what are you saying/proposing/imagining?
 
Try the first few chapters of "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" (Bill Bryson).
 
and .......................................................?
 
Lunaticsamurai said:
So anyway, light travels at 186,232 miles per seconds, that's one quick quarter mile...
Click to expand...

There that looks much better now it is a thousand times faster! (y)
 
Some interesting facts about neutron stars. A neutron star is a dead star. The nuclear process within has finished, and with no nuclear force pushing out the star's matter, it has collapsed within itself.

There is one neutron star whose original mass was around three times that of our sun. But it is now compressed in to a sphere just 12 miles across. It is so dense that a single teaspoon of it weighs more than 5 billion tonnes. Its surface gravity is 200 billion times stronger than ours. An object dropped from a height of just one metre above a neutron star would hit its surface travelling at a speed of 4.5 million mph.
 
One statistic I read that left me :eek: was

There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the Earth

Just the amount of grains on one beach is mind boggling
 
Speaking of sand....

If the Earth was the size of a grain of sand.... then the Milky Way would be approx. 60 million miles across :eek: that's about two thirds of the distance to the sun.
 
MisterE said:
Some interesting facts about neutron stars. A neutron star is a dead star. The nuclear process within has finished, and with no nuclear force pushing out the star's matter, it has collapsed within itself.

There is one neutron star whose original mass was around three times that of our sun. But it is now compressed in to a sphere just 12 miles across. It is so dense that a single teaspoon of it weighs more than 5 billion tonnes. Its surface gravity is 200 billion times stronger than ours. An object dropped from a height of just one metre above a neutron star would hit its surface travelling at a speed of 4.5 million mph.
Click to expand...
Great stuff. (y)
wack61 said:
One statistic I read that left me :eek: was

There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the Earth

Just the amount of grains on one beach is mind boggling
Click to expand...
That is correct, and that's everysingle beach and desert on the planet.

Splog said:
Speaking of sand....

If the Earth was the size of a grain of sand.... then the Milky Way would be approx. 60 million miles across :eek: that's about two thirds of the distance to the sun.
Click to expand...

(y)
Speaking of the sun, the light from the sun takes just over 8 minutes to reach us, so what you are looking at is past events, events that happened just over 8 minutes ago.

Now look at Andromeda, and what you are actually looking at is the light 2.5 miilion years in Earths past history, what was happening on earth that long ago;
5577884790_fa3c497495.jpg

This guy happened that long ago, he is called, "Homo habilis" (no jokes :) )


Homo is the genus that includes modern humans and species closely related to them. The genus is estimated to be about 2.3 to 2.4 million years old,
[1][2] evolving from australopithecine ancestors with the appearance of Homo habilis. Specifically, H. habilis is assumed to be the direct descendant of Australopithecus garhi which lived about 2.5 million years ago.

The most salient physiological development between the two species is the increase in cranial capacity, from about 450 cc (27 ** in) in A. garhi to 600 cc (37 ** in) in H. habilis. Within the Homo genus, cranial capacity again doubled from H. habilis to H. heidelbergensis by 0.6 million years ago. The cranial capacity of H. heidelbergensis overlaps with the range found in modern humans. However in May 2010, H. gautengensis was discovered, a species believed to be even older than H. habilis.[3]

The advent of Homo coincides with the first evidence of stone tools (the Oldowan industry), and thus by definition with the beginning of the Lower Palaeolithic. The emergence of Homo also coincides roughly with the onset of Quaternary glaciation, the beginning of the current ice age.

All species of the genus except Homo sapiens (modern humans) are extinct. Homo neanderthalensis, traditionally considered the last surviving relative, died out about 24,000 years ago, while a recent discovery suggests that another species, Homo floresiensis, discovered in 2003, may have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The discovery of Denisova hominin, announced in March 2010, may reveal it to be yet another species in the genus.






Keep em coming folks.
 
How can there be a Final Frontier? Surely that means there is something beyond it, and so that will also have a frontier (or Side ear, or Spock ear, and Elf ear......)
 
hmmm, i now want to know how many grains of sand there are on every beach........ and is that high tide or low tide? :LOL:

and also how many stars in the universe..............;)
 
lawrie29 said:
How can there be a Final Frontier? Surely that means there is something beyond it, and so that will also have a frontier (or Side ear, or Spock ear, and Elf ear......)
Click to expand...

Was the only thing i could think of for a title, condisering...

Another thing to get your heads around.

This is a picture of the timeline of the universe.
5577907186_af8536918b_z.jpg

Now if you look at the furthest point which our technology can see at between 13-15 billion light years away, your looking at something 9 billion years before the earth had even formed, it was just dust particals in space.

So in the same sense, since that light is hitting our eyes now, that object is now anoth 9 billion years into the future... So the biggest question is, "where is it now"
 
Actually what I find mind boggling is that even though the light has taken billions of years to reach us the light is completely ageless.... Light cannot have an age as time doesn't exist for light, so for the light it didn't take any time at all...... It happened in an instant.
 
Splog said:
Actually what I find mind boggling is that even though the light has taken billions of years to reach us the light is completely ageless.... Light cannot have an age as time doesn't exist for light, so for the light it didn't take any time at all...... It happened in an instant.
Click to expand...

Did you ask it?
 
Lynton said:
hmmm, i now want to know how many grains of sand there are on every beach........ and is that high tide or low tide? :LOL:

and also how many stars in the universe..............;)
Click to expand...

Well, there is roughly 100-400 billion stars in our own galaxy, and there are around 50 billion galaxies in the universe, so for every star in the milky way, there is a galaxy... If you think i am doing the math on that one, think again.:LOL:

There are roughly 170 billion galaxies in the universe, our own seems about average in size at 100.000 light year diameter
The largest know galaxy is IC 1101 it lives 1 billion light years away in the massive abell 2029 galaxy cluster.

It is 60 times larger than our own galaxy and it contains 100 trillion stars alot more than our own. So with the varian sizes of the galaxies out there its hard to say exactly how many, but a study showed there to be around 200 billion billion more stars than sand.


Our own Galaxy also contains around 50 billion planets 500million of which are in the habitable zone to thier parent star.
 
Some simple maths if anyone's interested....

There are roughly 63,300 inches in a mile and there are roughly 63,300 Astronomical units in a light year....... An Astronomical unit (Au) is about 93 million miles i.e. the distance from the Earth to the Sun..... So if you can imagine the distance from the Earth to the Sun represented as one inch? the miles and Light Years correspond. :cool:

Edit for clarity: If a star is 5 light years away then on the above scale it would be 5 miles away... 1 inch equals 93,000,000 miles
 
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Splog said:
Actually what I find mind boggling is that even though the light has taken billions of years to reach us the light is completely ageless.... Light cannot have an age as time doesn't exist for light, so for the light it didn't take any time at all...... It happened in an instant.
Click to expand...

I'm inclined to disagree.

Light has to abide by all the laws, since nothing can travel faster than light, to date. In a vacuum light will travel at 186,232 miles per second, this has been measured. For light to be void of time would imply that light moves through time and it doesn't.
However there is this theory that light does not move at a contant speed and we cannot measure light as it has no mass, so therefore we do not know old the universe is.
 
Splog said:
Some simple maths if anyone's interested....

There are roughly 63,300 inches in a mile and there are roughly 63,300 Astronomical units in a light year....... An Astronomical unit (Au) is about 93 million miles i.e. the distance from the Earth to the Sun..... So if you can imagine the distance from the Earth to the Sun represented as one inch? the miles and Light Years correspond. :cool:

Edit for clarity: If a star is 5 light years away then on the above scale it would be 5 miles away... 1 inch equals 93,000,000 miles
Click to expand...

Can you work this one out for me as i am going to bed.
This is the distance in mile from us to Andromeda 14,813,819,500,000,000,000 miles

(y)
 
Splog said:
Some simple maths if anyone's interested....

There are roughly 63,300 inches in a mile and there are roughly 63,300 Astronomical units in a light year....... An Astronomical unit (Au) is about 93 million miles i.e. the distance from the Earth to the Sun..... So if you can imagine the distance from the Earth to the Sun represented as one inch? the miles and Light Years correspond. :cool:

Edit for clarity: If a star is 5 light years away then on the above scale it would be 5 miles away... 1 inch equals 93,000,000 miles
Click to expand...

:eek: It can't be coincidence, there must be an intelligent designer....oh wait :rules:

:LOL:
 
Lunaticsamurai said:
Well, there is roughly 100-400 billion stars in our own galaxy, and there are around 50 billion galaxies in the universe, so for every star in the milky way, there is a galaxy... If you think i am doing the math on that one, think again.:LOL:

There are roughly 170 billion galaxies in the universe, our own seems about average in size at 100.000 light year diameter
The largest know galaxy is IC 1101 it lives 1 billion light years away in the massive abell 2029 galaxy cluster.

It is 60 times larger than our own galaxy and it contains 100 trillion stars alot more than our own. So with the varian sizes of the galaxies out there its hard to say exactly how many, but a study showed there to be around 200 billion billion more stars than sand.


Our own Galaxy also contains around 50 billion planets 500million of which are in the habitable zone to thier parent star.
Click to expand...

And this is what God was supposed to have created :thinking:
 
i am guessing here, and am way out of my comfort zone, but maybe, light itself doesn't have a time refererce.... hey it's near enough instant, but in a relative space of distance, it takes some time to get there????????

What I don't understand though, and again being

A) a thicket
B) and quoting Prof B Cox "wonders of the universe, 2011, page 8)

"The universe is 13.7 Bn years old, 45 Bn light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies"

Surely if nothing can exceed the sped of light, how come the diameter of the universe is more than twice its age? (My dippy reasoning is : assume we are the centre and it expands....... then 2 x Radius = diameter) 2 x 13.7 is 27.4 so where is the rest?

I fully appreciate, I have missed something very significant..... but... what?
 
Lunaticsamurai said:
I'm inclined to disagree.

Light has to abide by all the laws, since nothing can travel faster than light, to date. In a vacuum light will travel at 186,232 miles per second, this has been measured. For light to be void of time would imply that light moves through time and it doesn't.
However there is this theory that light does not move at a contant speed and we cannot measure light as it has no mass, so therefore we do not know old the universe is.
Click to expand...

Please do feel free to disagree... That's what makes a good discussion ;)

If anything travels at the speed of light (and the only thing that can do that is light) then time does not exist.

SOL is a constant.... Fact!

Light (in a vacuum i.e. space) always travels at a constant speed .... E=Mc2 Very well established and proven.

I'm fascinated to know about this theory of which you speak that shows Einstein's theory to be wrong?

We do know that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old..... Again not sure what you mean by 'we can't measure light as it has no mass' please explain.... :thinking:
 
Lynton said:
i am guessing here, and am way out of my comfort zone, but maybe, light itself doesn't have a time refererce.... hey it's near enough instant, but in a relative space of distance, it takes some time to get there????????

What I don't understand though, and again being

A) a thicket
B) and quoting Prof B Cox "wonders of the universe, 2011, page 8)

"The universe is 13.7 Bn years old, 45 Bn light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies"

Surely if nothing can exceed the sped of light, how come the diameter of the universe is more than twice its age? (My dippy reasoning is : assume we are the centre and it expands....... then 2 x Radius = diameter) 2 x 13.7 is 27.4 so where is the rest?

I fully appreciate, I have missed something very significant..... but... what?
Click to expand...

At the time of the big bang neither light nor time existed! The thing to remember is that the big bang happened everywhere at the same time.. so there is no centre! Think of it as a balloon skin inflating (without the air inside) ..... Everything is moving away from everything (not quite true, but keep it simple) .... Hope this helps ;)
 
Lunaticsamurai said:
I'm inclined to disagree.

Light has to abide by all the laws, since nothing can travel faster than light, to date. In a vacuum light will travel at 186,232 miles per second, this has been measured. For light to be void of time would imply that light moves through time and it doesn't.
However there is this theory that light does not move at a contant speed and we cannot measure light as it has no mass, so therefore we do not know old the universe is.
Click to expand...

Light moves at a constant speed (c) in a vacuum that's been proven experimentally numerous times. Its speed does vary through other mediums. The reason that light can travel at c is because its force carrier, the photon, has zero rest mass. However, if it were unaffected by time then mirrors wouldn't work, nor would prisms and your camera lens would be useless. Light can be measured - we measure its wavelength, its intensity, its energy and the time it takes to move from one point to another.

Measurement of the age of the universe is dependent on its expansion and the consequent red shift of light - it's measurable which is why we have good scientific estimates of the age of the universe.
 
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Lynton said:
i am guessing here, and am way out of my comfort zone, but maybe, light itself doesn't have a time refererce.... hey it's near enough instant, but in a relative space of distance, it takes some time to get there????????

What I don't understand though, and again being

A) a thicket
B) and quoting Prof B Cox "wonders of the universe, 2011, page 8)

"The universe is 13.7 Bn years old, 45 Bn light years across and filled with 100 billion galaxies"

Surely if nothing can exceed the sped of light, how come the diameter of the universe is more than twice its age? (My dippy reasoning is : assume we are the centre and it expands....... then 2 x Radius = diameter) 2 x 13.7 is 27.4 so where is the rest?

I fully appreciate, I have missed something very significant..... but... what?
Click to expand...

Normal geometry doesn't really apply to the expansion of the universe - it's not a linear function. During the expansion phase it expanded a lot faster than it is expanding now and it's not a sphere.
 
lawrie29 said:
How can there be a Final Frontier? Surely that means there is something beyond it, and so that will also have a frontier (or Side ear, or Spock ear, and Elf ear......)
Click to expand...


I guess with typical physics that final frontier would be the edge of our known universe. .. beyond that edge there is nothing ...Literally nothing.

Nothing doesn’t have to be anywhere ..it is nothing. it does not exist.

Its not that hard to get your head around ...just takes a few tries I find.

They suggest (scientists) that nothing is the original state. the universe is a glitch. ... impressive either way hey.
 
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BBC 4 now ( and probably the iPlayer as well) Everything and Nothing - Answering the question of what is nothing.
 
Going in the opposite direction, from outer space to inner space, there is so much empty space in matter, including our own bodies, it's a puzzle as to why we and most things aren't transparent.

If you were to zoom in on an atom to the nucleus and imagine it was say the size of a pea, the electrons orbiting it would be the size of grains of sand. But those grains of sand would be orbiting at a distance of about half a mile.
 
lawrie29 said:
BBC 4 now ( and probably the iPlayer as well) Everything and Nothing - Answering the question of what is nothing.
Click to expand...

So if I followed that proigram right last night...?

We sit within a void of quantum soup that is in fact abundant with matter and antimatter partials snapping in and out of existence absolutey everywhere, all of the time, like right in front of us right now.
Our universe is the result of a one in a billionth mismatching antimatter partner.. .. this missing antimatter partner causes the glitch, which is the big bang, hence our universe.

:eek:
 
Forbiddenbiker said:
So if I followed that proigram right last night...?

We sit within a void of quantum soup that is in fact abundant with matter and antimatter partials snapping in and out of existence absolutey everywhere, all of the time, like right in front of us right now.
Our universe is the result of a one in a billionth mismatching antimatter partner.. .. this missing antimatter partner causes the glitch, which is the big bang, hence our universe.

:eek:
Click to expand...

Not quite...

At the instant of the big bang there wouldn't have been any matter as such just an enormous amount of energy at an unimaginably high temperature - at that point the weak force, the strong force and the electromagnetic force were effectively unified. It was only when the energy levels fell below around 100GeV and the weak and electromagnetic forces separated that unstable quarks and leptons started to condense - the quark-lepton era. It was at that point that the majority of matter/anti-matter annihilation took place and that was where the minute imbalance put ordinary matter ahead. The matter/anti-matter annihilation continued until mean energy levels fell to around 1GeV - that was the start of the hadron era and the formation of the beginnings of matter as we know it today.

Interestingly, until the formation and eventual death of the first stars, the largest stable nucleus that existed was lithium 7 - that was the extent of the nucleosynthesis in the very early universe.

Well, you did ask :LOL:
 
Islander said:
Interestingly, until the formation and eventual death of the first stars, the largest stable nucleus that existed was lithium 7 - that was the extent of the nucleosynthesis in the very early universe.

Well, you did ask :LOL:
Click to expand...

No I love it, how could anyone not. :D ...so what is it that’s interesting about hat last bit above then? all the bigger elements are made later in the bigger hotter stars type thing? Whys is lithium 7 exciting (like I know what the 7 means, not)

So on that first paragraph of yours... That would replace my 'one in a billionth mismatching antimatter partner' sentence? .. until levels fell to around 1GeV (whatever math thing that is ) then the matter forming etc. Think I’ve got that. ;)
 
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Blurrrrrrrrrr! Dizzy! I guess knowing where we come from is the ultimate question. And I'm guessing CERN will answer a few questions on that matter very soon or annihilate us, either way:) But, my sadness comes when the likes of NASA has its funds taken away to fight some :rules: war. Sending a man to Mars is the ultimate discovery in this millennium for me and I just don’t think I’ll I see it and that p***es me off, because when I was a kid I thought by the 2030 the pleasure my parents had of man landing on the moon would be mirrored with the greater achievement of man landing on Mars. Looks like I can only hope that my Son see’s it now.
 
It's interesting because given the lack of heavier elements, no life could have existed until the first generation of stars had formed and died. The 7 is the isotope number - an isotope of an element is one where the nucleus has more neutrons than protons. In the case of lithium, its atomic number is 3 and thus it has 3 protons and 3 neutrons in its nucleus. Lithium 7 has 3 protons and 7 neutrons.

The only primordial elements that we forged in the big bang were hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium.
 
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