Tuesday 26 May 2009

Zoot Horn's guest entry

Zoot's an astronomer, as befits a Renaissance polymath such as he is. He provides this:

Here's what our Milky Way might look like from the outside - which is pretty much what it looks like from the inside too. It's the Andromeda galaxy, which is, I believe, the most distant object visible to the naked eye (on a moonless night, with no towns around, with averted vision, it's a tiny hint of light but pretty easy to spot). Part of our local group of galaxies (with 2 elliptical 'satellite' galaxies in the same field of view) it is, I think, despite the big bang, one of the few extra-galactic cosmic objects that is actually moving towards us. It's 2.5 million light years away. Which in miles is probably:
I86,000 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 2,500,000. Or something.
There aren't any buses.


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