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To: XBob; All
Absolutely beautiful.

But remember that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy. Our solar system is in one of the spiral arms. This stunning picture is just the stars visible in the spiral arm next to ours. We can't see (in the visible light spectrum) anything past that (because of interstellar gas and dust).

In other words, it shows only a tiny fraction of the hundred billion stars in our galaxy.

And our galaxy is only one of the hundred billion galaxies in the Universe!
21 posted on 02/25/2010 5:12:20 PM PST by CzarChasm (My opinion. No charge.)
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To: CzarChasm

Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough.
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you’ve had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff!
Just - re-member that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
it’s 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
but out by us it’s just 3000 light-years wide.
We’re 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.


25 posted on 02/25/2010 5:22:33 PM PST by listenhillary (the only reason government wants to be our provider is so it may become our master)
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