re: Gaia Space Telescope to release most precise map of the Milky Way ever tomorrow

shite is pretty fricking awesome

Video

Other video. Some reason it wouldn’t link in the post LINK

I'm wondering the same thing. Stars or planets and where? It seems like its kind of ebb and flow like water too, but I'm a complete novice at this stuff.

I'll get interested when the James Webb Telescope successfully makes it to the L2 Lagrangian point without incident. Compared to the Hubble, which has like an 8 feet diameter mirror, the JW has a combined diameter of 21 feet. It will take some amazing readings. It has better instruments capable of taking readings in the infrared, which will make the L2 point crucial, for the avoidance of interference of light, heat, etc from sun and earth.
As a comparison for an object in the L2 Lagrangian point, JW will being in a position roughly 900,000 miles away from earth, whereas the Hubble is only 340 miles above earth. What sucks, though, is if it has any problems, it's unlikely we can ever get there to fix it.

I'm more interested in it's secondary goal of being able to possibly image exoplanets directly, which may be a game changer.

None of this is real.

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Yea but is the earth round or flat?

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Earth: flat

Moon: round (#duh)

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Allyson Sheffield, an astrophysicist at LaGuardia Community College,

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Eat shite, MIT and Harvard.

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who was not involved in the project.

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Never mind. Carry on.

Universe is expanding and distances between local clusters are increasing. But within a local cluster like the one our Milky Way and Andromeda is in together, gravity still is strong enough to pull things together. At some point in the future all other clusters will be too far away to receive any light from, so to future beings it will look like the then combined Milky Way and andromeda galaxy is all there is to the universe. No light from other galaxies will ever reach us

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I thought things in space were moving away from each other? The universe was expanding?

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The Universe is expanding, at an increasing rate. However, within that expansion are groups and clusters of galaxies that are effecting their gravities upon one another. These interactions have created an enormous structure that looks like this:



A close up view. Each tiny dot represents a galaxy.



Many people think the structure of the galaxy clusters in the Universe resembles the structure of neuron clusters in the brain.

Well at one time that was correct.

Right, in general the universe is expanding at an excelerared rate. But occasionally you get stuff like this

A pileup of 14 distant galaxies is set to become the most massive structure in the universe