astronomy & space stuff

does anyone know

our solar system is located on the outer rim of the orion spur of the milky way galaxy

what i cant seem to find is,how far exactly are we from the rim? the arm is 3500 light yrs thick, so, close to the rim can be a relative term.

anyone know how far we are from the empty space that separates us and the Sagittarius arm?


thanks :)
 
does anyone know

our solar system is located on the outer rim of the orion spur of the milky way galaxy

what i cant seem to find is,how far exactly are we from the rim? the arm is 3500 light yrs thick, so, close to the rim can be a relative term.

anyone know how far we are from the empty space that separates us and the Sagittarius arm?
About 26,000 light years to Sagittarius "A"

But then you run into the Black Hole..

But we're only half way out of the center...

Take a left ....proceed to the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy at about 60,000 light years distance

http://blackholes.stardate.org/images/phot-23a-02-normal.jpg
 
About 26,000 light years to Sagittarius "A"

But then you run into the Black Hole..

But we're only half way out of the center...

Take a left ....proceed to the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy at about 60,000 light years distance

http://blackholes.stardate.org/images/phot-23a-02-normal.jpg
I hope that photo with the double headed arrow depicting 1 light year was for comedic effect.

Otherwise, there are a host of dim wits who are going to think some of those thousand points of light are within a few city blocks of each other.
 
http://www******.com/scienceastronomy/080521-moon-explosion.html

100 Explosions Recorded on the Moon
By Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
posted: 21 May 2008
10:55 am ET


Not so long ago, anyone claiming to see flashes of light on the Moon would be viewed with deep suspicion by professional astronomers. Such reports were filed under "L" ... for lunatic.

Not anymore. Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times.

"They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope."

The impactor was a tiny fragment of extinct comet 2003 EH1. Every year in early January, the Earth-Moon system passes through a stream of debris from that comet, producing the well-known Quadrantid meteor shower. Here on Earth, Quadrantids disintegrate as flashes of light in the atmosphere; on the airless Moon they hit the ground and explode.

"We started our monitoring program in late 2005 after NASA announced plans to return astronauts to the Moon," says team leader Rob Suggs of the MSFC. If people were going to be walking around up there, "it seemed like a good idea to measure how often the Moon was getting hit."

"Almost immediately, we detected a flash."

That first detection — "I'll never forget it," he says — came on Nov. 7, 2005, when a piece of Comet Encke about the size of a baseball hit Mare Imbrium. The resulting explosion produced a 7th magnitude flash, too dim for the naked eye but an easy target for the team's 10-inch telescope.

A common question, says Cooke, is "how can something explode on the Moon? There's no oxygen up there."

These explosions don't require oxygen or combustion. Meteoroids hit the moon with tremendous kinetic energy, traveling 30,000 mph or faster. "At that speed, even a pebble can blast a crater several feet wide. The impact heats up rocks and soil on the lunar surface hot enough to glow like molten lava — hence the flash."

During meteor showers such as the Quadrantids or Perseids, when the Moon passes through dense streams of cometary debris, the rate of lunar flashes can go as high as one per hour. Impacts subside when the Moon exits the stream, but curiously the rate never goes to zero.

"Even when no meteor shower is active, we still see flashes," says Cooke.

These "off-shower" impacts come from a vast swarm of natural space junk littering the inner solar system. Bits of stray comet dust and chips off old asteroids pepper the Moon in small but ultimately significant numbers. Earth gets hit, too, which is why on any given night you can stand under a dark sky and see a few meteors per hour glide overhead — no meteor shower required. Over the course of a year, these random or "sporadic" impacts outnumber impacts from organized meteor showers by a ratio of approximately 2:1.

"That's an important finding," says Suggs. "It means there's no time of year when the Moon is impact-free."

Fortunately, says Cooke, astronauts are in little danger. "The odds of a direct hit are negligible. If, however, we start building big lunar outposts with lots of surface area, we'll have to carefully consider these statistics and bear in mind the odds of a structure getting hit."

Secondary impacts are the greater concern. When meteoroids strike the Moon, debris goes flying in all directions. A single meteoroid produces a spray consisting of thousands of "secondary" particles all traveling at bullet-like velocities. This could be a problem because, while the odds of a direct hit are low, the odds of a secondary hit may be significantly greater. "Secondary particles smaller than a millimeter could pierce a spacesuit," notes Cooke.

At present, no one knows how far and wide secondary particles travel. To get a handle on the problem, Cooke, Suggs and colleagues are shooting artificial meteoroids at simulated moon dust and measuring the spray. This work is being done at the Vertical Gun Range at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Meanwhile, back at the observatory, the team has upgraded their original 10-inch (25 cm) telescope to a pair of telescopes, one 14-inch (36 cm) and one 20-inch (51 cm), located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. They've also established a new observing site in Georgia with a 14-inch telescope. Multiple telescopes allow double- and triple-checking of faint flashes and improve the statistical underpinnings of the survey.

"The Moon is still flashing," says Suggs. Indeed, during the writing of this story, three more impacts were detected, bringing the total to 103.
 
was reading were 26,000 light years from the galactic core. shouldnt the Sagittarius arm be much much closer?
http://www.messier.obspm.fr/more/mw.html

<snip>
Our solar system is thus situated within the outer regions of this galaxy, well within the disk and only about 20 light years "above" the equatorial symmetry plane (to the direction of the Galactic North Pole, see below), but about 28,000 light years from the Galactic Center.

Therefore, the Milky Way shows up as luminous band spanning all around the sky along this symmetry plane, which is also called the "Galactic Equator".

Its center lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, but very close to the border of both neighbor constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus.

The distance of 28,000 light years has recently (1997) been confirmed by the data of ESA's astrometric satellite Hipparcos.

Other investigations published consequently have disputed this value and propose a smaller value of some 25,000 light years, based on stellar dynamics; a recent investigation (McNamara et.al 2000, based on RR Lyrae variables) yields roughly 26,000 light years.

These data, if of significance, wouldn't immediately effect values for distances of particular objects in the Milky Way or beyond.
<snip>

http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect20/galaxyMW.jpg
 
Not so long ago, anyone claiming to see flashes of light on the Moon would be viewed with deep suspicion by professional astronomers. Such reports were filed under "L" ... for lunatic.

Not anymore. Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times.

"They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope."

http://www.spaceweather3.com/swpod2006/14jun06/movie760.gif

NASA is planning on crashing a space probe into the moon in 2009.
The explosion will be visible on Earth through a telescope and it will create a crater roughly the size of a third of a football field.
This explosion does actually have a purpose; NASA is searching for ice on the moon to step closer to human stationing on the moon.
 
NASA is planning on crashing a space probe into the moon in 2009.
The explosion will be visible on Earth through a telescope and it will create a crater roughly the size of a third of a football field.
This explosion does actually have a purpose; NASA is searching for ice on the moon to step closer to human stationing on the moon.

They should do it just because it's cool. Not going to hurt anything. They should gather all the dead satellites and other space junk, bundle it up, strap a rocket to it and ram it into the moon. Pyro and ballyhoo!
 
T- minus 1 hour 45 minutes...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/main/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Those seven minutes of descent, the very last leg of the months-long journey, could be the killer: the lander, its developers say, faces "seven minutes of terror" before touching down. Of 11 total attempts by several nations to put a spacecraft on Mars, according to NASA, only five have been successful.

In entering the thin Martian atmosphere and heading to the surface, Phoenix faces these tribulations: "aeroshell braking" via friction with the atmosphere will heat it to thousands of degrees, a parachute will give the lander a hard jerk to slow it further, and pulsing retrorockets will be tasked with making a soft touchdown.

Because it takes 15 minutes for signals to travel between Mars and Earth, Phoenix is designed to land autonomously--and there will be an anxious lag time for Mission Control while awaiting data that will signal whether the landing was a success.

At the earliest, that confirmation will come at about 4:53 p.m. PDT Sunday.

NASA will provide a mission briefing at 12:00 p.m. PT Sunday. Coverage of the landing on NASA TV begins at 3:30 p.m. PT.

At midday Sunday, NASA said things were accelerating: "The spacecraft's speed relative to Mars increased from 6,300 miles per hour at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time to 8,500 mph at 12:30 p.m., headed for a speed higher than 12,000 mph before reaching the top of the Martian atmosphere."

Shockley joked in his blog about the spacecraft's energy efficiency. "At a time when gas prices are soaring," he wrote, "Phoenix is getting good fuel economy at about 2 million miles per gallon."
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/229862main_phx-eventtimes.jpg
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20080525/Phoenix_540x303.jpg
 
Oboma is preparing an apology speech and Clinton is already saying "I told ya so!"
 
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