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Striking view of 'Milky Way twin'

kharga

By kharga
in The Astro Lounge

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blackparticle

blackparticle

Posted
Posted

Great image but of course, you'd expect that from ESA. :)

There are interesting spec's on the scope used on the ESA site. Only 2200mm at f/8 coupled with an array of a decade old CCDs if they used the wide-field imager. 8000 x 8000 px ?

ESO - La Silla Telescopes: 2.2m Telescope Overview

For a Mag 9.1 galaxy with a size of +0°15'30", I'm surprised there isn't a picture of it on here. I wonder how close a modern amateur setup could get to that?

Best pic ever? Challenge anyone? :)

Alan.

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

Posted
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Great image, as someone says I wonder how they actually know that the milky way looks like that when viewed from above

I got a chance to find out on a Jodrell bank course. The course students all got telescope time on a small radio dish. We went round the entire plane of the Milky Way mapping emission at 21 cm. This wavelength is the signature of hydrogen regions in spiral arms. You can distinguish between signal from one arm and another in front of (or behind) it by small changes in the Doppler shift depending on each arm's movement relative to us. It was a brilliant experiment.

A couple of years ago I had a retired French professional astronomer visit. He had known Hendrik Van de Hulst, the guy who predicted the existance of the telltale 21cm emmission which first made mapping the Milky Way possible.

Hendrik C. van de Hulst - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Olly

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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On the news this this morning it said it was 30 milion Light years away.

been trying to get my head round that.

Anybody care to put that as a number on here.............In miles of course.

I did a quick sum and got 2.8 x 10^20 Km.

280 million million million Km.

I always get these things wrong though!

Olly

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jamespels

jamespels

Posted
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On the news this this morning it said it was 30 milion Light years away.

been trying to get my head round that.

Anybody care to put that as a number on here.............In miles of course.

30 million light years is (approximately)...

- 180,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles

- 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 km

- 1,935,000,000,000 Astronomical Units (mean Earth - Sun distance)

- 9,200,000 parsecs

So, driving there in your car at 60 mph (and avoiding the obvious problems with this!) would take you

- 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 hours

- 125,000,000,000,000,000 days

- 17,857,000,000,000,000 weeks

- 4,167,000,000,000,000 months

- 342,000,000,000,000 years

or about 26,000 times longer than the universe is old :)

Assuming a 25 year age gap between all of your descendents, it would take about 13,680,000,000,000 generations. Chances are, along the way they will evolve into several million new species, one with inherent time travel abilities and who is already there having a nice cold beer on the veranda. Or something.

Prof Cox would be proud of all those ,000s :)

OK, I know I have left myself wide open to somebody pointing out that I cannot divide properly and have these numbers wrong so I'll update them as the corrections come in :hello2:

J.

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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Hi Olly, I'll take 280 million million million to be about 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 so we're probably both about right on that one :)

That's Derbyshire brain power for you! :)

Olly

(Watch us both be wrong!)

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Domis

Domis

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The sad part is that if you could drive there at 60 mph,it probably wouldn't even be there when you arrived.Gobbled up by a black hole or collided with another galaxy or some other form of cosmic predation.

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Superewza

Superewza

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The sad part is that if you could drive there at 60 mph,it probably wouldn't even be there when you arrived.Gobbled up by a black hole or collided with another galaxy or some other form of cosmic predation.

Hell of a black hole that could swallow a galaxy :)

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