January 7, 2009
-
My new wallpaper
This is a recently released photo taken by the Hubble Telescope of the center of the Milky Way. It is a composite color infrared image that contains an area 115 light years long by 300 light years wide. Consider: light circles the Equator over 7 times per second. At that rate, it would still take 300 years for light to travel the width of this photograph and 100,000 years to travel the span of the Milky Way galaxy, one galaxy of billions. The supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center is somewhere in this picture, but being smaller than our solar system, is much smaller than a single pixel on this scale.
For more information and downloads of the photo, go to the official Hubblesite.
This photo brought to my attention by Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog - a fantastic source for quick hits of astronomy news and analysis for the layman.
Comments (2)
That's a really cool picture. Bowling ball makers should hope to do so well with their designs. The Bad Astronomy blog is interesting but scary--why doesn't Oklahoma surprise me? Check out Oklahoma on the electoral map from 2008: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html Even Tulsa was heavily Republican, and big cities are usually heavily Democratic. Then again, it is the home of Oral Roberts University ... Hopefully the clip from "The Onion" below won't hit too close to home.
Area Teen Accidentally Enters Teen Center
January 7, 2009 | Issue 45•02 The Onion
SANDUSKY, OH—In a moment of confusion, area teenager Eric Dooley briefly walked into a local teen outreach center Tuesday, a place that neither he nor any of his teenaged friends would ever knowingly enter. "Oh, geez. I'm sorry," the 15-year-old said as he quickly assessed the four battered foosball tables, outdated PlayStation console, overly friendly counselor, and garish orange and purple paint scheme—all intended to appeal to him—before exiting the facility in less than six seconds. "This isn't where I'm supposed to be. Sorry. Sorry." Dooley reportedly joined a gang later that afternoon.
@youarehere72 - The Onion is way off. We only have one barely standing foosball table, our outdated Playstation stopped working and was thrown out a month ago, and our paint scheme is bright red, blue, green, and yellow. Shows what they know.
Comments are closed.