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Milky way thicker than we thought
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Mr. Majestic Send message Joined: 26 Nov 07 Posts: 4752 Credit: 258,845 RAC: 0 |
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is twice as thick as we thought it was, Australian astrophysicists discover. This article was taken from Abc.net science |
hammerstak Send message Joined: 2 Mar 02 Posts: 200 Credit: 2,874,433 RAC: 0 |
Time to start calling it "The Creamy Way"? Sorry for the corniness...it had to be said. |
Labbie Send message Joined: 19 Jun 06 Posts: 4083 Credit: 5,930,102 RAC: 0 |
Time to start calling it "The Creamy Way"? Or The Buttermilky Way. ;) Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now |
William Rothamel Send message Joined: 25 Oct 06 Posts: 3756 Credit: 1,999,735 RAC: 4 |
I didn't know that there were pulsars inside our Galaxy. I thought that light is slowed only by expansion of the universe and not by any interaction with interstellar material--Seems to me this would conflict with the redshift determination that the universe is expanding, and expanding at an increasing rate. Someone elucidate please ?? |
RandyC Send message Joined: 20 Oct 99 Posts: 714 Credit: 1,704,345 RAC: 0 |
I didn't know that there were pulsars inside our Galaxy. I thought that light is slowed only by expansion of the universe and not by any interaction with interstellar material--Seems to me this would conflict with the redshift determination that the universe is expanding, and expanding at an increasing rate. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of pulsars inside our Galaxy. The most famous is probably the one at the heart of the Crab Nebula. The Speed of Light can be slowed by many things. It's mostly dependant on the density of the material (gas) it's passing through. An easy example is the refraction of light in a prism. The different frequencies of light travel through glass at different speeds causing them to spread-out in the familiar colors of the rainbow. |
Odysseus Send message Joined: 26 Jul 99 Posts: 1808 Credit: 6,701,347 RAC: 6 |
[…] I thought that light is slowed only by expansion of the universe and not by any interaction with interstellar material […] When light is Doppler-shifted it doesn’t speed up or slow down: its speed is always c in a vacuum, or just a little less in rarefied media, regardless of how much energy it carries. Whatever may affect its propagation speed is quite independent of the Doppler effect, whether from relative motion of the source & receiver through space or from cosmological expansion. |
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