“Heaven this way!”-——————————>
I have bookmarked this for later. Much, much later.
There’s a hell of a big magnet out there someplace!
Ah ! This is proof positive of global warming. Two billion Galaxies have joined us today to get the message out that we have to stop using SUV's
Buy your Carbon Credits from me at....
Do they point to the right or the left?
Just wondering.
Maybe it's important or something.
.
bump for later read
It’s a reverberative echo of Babe Ruth, calling his shot.
I created a great thought problem for astronomers, which I call the “time machine game”.
Some inventive genius creates a time machine that can take him either into the past or into the future. But unlike science fiction time machines, this one *doesn’t* move through space as well. With all the different speeds and directions we are traveling through space on spaceship Earth, all at the same time, when he materializes, his time machine is a long way away from where he started, most likely high up in the sky or inside the Earth, after even just a few seconds.
This means that either going back in time a year, or going into the future a year, the time machine is going to materialize out in empty space, the planet Earth no longer being where it was a year ago, or having not yet arrived at where it is going to be in a year.
But the question is: in what direction, in the past, or in the future?
To make things easier, just disregard the daily turning of the Earth, and since it is exactly one year in either direction, it will be in the same relative position around the sun.
But you need to figure out what direction the solar system is moving through the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving through the universe, to figure out where the Earth, and thus the time machine, was a year ago, and where it will be in a year.
That is, from the point of view of Earth, right now, you should be able to draw two lines into space, pointing in whatever direction the Earth was a year ago, and will be in a year.
Interestingly, if the time machine could *also* move in time relative to its location also, like a science fiction time machine, using some creative math, you could travel around the galaxy in your time machine by going into the past and the future, then *not* travel as you go in the other direction in time.
That is, say traveling into the past until where you want to be is where you are; then traveling into the future *with* that point in space until you are back in the present, but say, on the other side of the galaxy, which is where you traveled to is, in the here and now.
But to win the game, you should be able to look into the night sky, in the general direction of some stars, and say that that relative direction was where Earth was a year ago, and look at some other stars and say, and that is the direction where we will be in a year.
Didn’t their mothers teach them it’s not polite to point?
I’m not sure if it’s an Octopole moment or just Miller Time.
Huh? Dude! Get a life.
Don’t MRI machines take their images by lining up the hydrogen nuclei in all of the atoms in your body so that point the same way?
So...I get it...maybe we’re all in some sort of incomprehensibly colossal MRI machine. Yeah, that’s it. And...the solar systems and galaxies are all just atoms and molecules inside some being’s equally incomprehensibly huge body. And...the body is being medically scanned (by God?) And...the prognosis is, “weird.”
Man, these science articles really make you think.
They all point at me.
I am at the center of the universe and I can prove it.
No matter what direction I face, the distance to the edge of the universe is infinite.
Ergo, I am at the center of the universe.
The same is true for you.
Sincerely,
Lola Granola
Your mom. XD
I can die a happy man now.
SEE ROCK CITY
Well what do we take from this startling revelation?
Could it be that one of the lessons of the universe is that diversity isn’t always optimal after all?
As it applies to eliptical orbits, there seems to be a lot of conformity...
Looking at the pdf of the paper linked at slashdot, it seems the author is making a fairly weak claim. He found a direction that maximized the correlation of the elliptical axes with that line of sight, and reports the finding that the correlation is great enough to be extremely unlikely to be due to chance. However, the degree of correlation is small. The average ellipticity is 0.225 and he “bins” the data by the sine of the angle with the assumed preferred axis and finds that the best fit is a line with average ellipticity of 0.220 looking along the axis, and 0.229 looking perpendicular to it.
If the galaxies all had ellipticities of 0.225, and were all aligned with the axis, the average ellipticity would be 0 looking along the axis.
Note also that his worst fit finds 0.003 of the ellipticity accounted for by correlation, as opposed to 0.009 in the best fit.
With a lot of data, the chi-squared method very commonly gives a low “probability of rejecting the null hypothesis” along with a weak correlation, and textbooks warn of this. Note that the method merely asserts that there is SOME source of correlation other than chance, and this could easily be in the data collection process itself.