Time to learn something!
1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click on "Random article" in the left-hand sidebar box.
3. Post it!
I understand only one sentence in mine:
NGC 6745 (also known as UGC 11391) is an irregular galaxy about 206 million light-years (63.5 parsecs) away in the constellation Lyra. It is actually a triplet of galaxies in the process of colliding.
The three galaxies have been colliding for hundreds of millions of years. After passing through the larger galaxy (NGC 6745A), the smaller one (NCG 6745B) is now moving away. The larger galaxy was probably a spiral galaxy before the collision, but was damaged and now appears peculiar. It is unlikely that any stars in the two galaxies collided directly because of the vast distances between them. The gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields of the galaxies, however, do interact directly in a collision. As a result of this interaction, the smaller galaxy has probably lost most of its interstellar medium to the larger one.
The age of NGC 6745 is estimated to be ~10 Myr.[2]
I must have been absent the day we did astrophysics.
Can anyone out there really wrap their brains around the idea of light years? That a star whose light we see today died a bazillion years ago, but we're still seeing the light it made back then? Hello?
I rather can if I equate it to the delay in sound reaching my ears compared to seeing a ball struck by a batter.
However, the vast distances are beyond any scale with which any human is familiar. That said, I think we naturally we understand the universe in orders of magnitude (logarithmically) rather than in linear terms.
If that all sounds too highfalutin, just watch this video instead:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCfDRvDWid0
Posted by: James | July 18, 2007 at 12:33 PM
Having taken astrophysics in college, I have no problem dealing with concepts like light-years and interstellar distances.
Where things really get nutty is with objects like neutron stars (i.e., pulsars) and black holes. Something so dense that even light can't escape it, packing the mass of an entire star into a volume smaller than an atom...now, that's a real leap of imagination.
Posted by: Elisson | July 18, 2007 at 12:59 PM
Cue Charlie Brown's teacher's voice: "Bwa-bwa-bwah, bwa-bwa-bwa-bwa-bwah." Sorry, it just does not compute.
The Simpsons, on the other hand, I GET. Thanks for the link, and the laugh. :-)
Posted by: Karen | July 18, 2007 at 01:11 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_monanthum
Allium monanthum
Allium monanthum is a small wild onion found in the woodlands of Korea. It is also known as Korean Wild Chive. The plant is used in traditional Korean herbal cooking alongside other wild "mountain vegetables" such as chwinamul, doraji (also called Chinese bellflower), and deodeok.
I get light years...was a astronomer technician in a former life....just think of them as distance measured in time. What I don't get is how to make plants stay alive.
Posted by: Karan | July 18, 2007 at 04:17 PM
I don't get light years AND I kill all plants. Sigh.
Posted by: Karen | July 18, 2007 at 07:19 PM
I'm thinking about what Elisson said. If light can't escape a neutron star or a black hole, can light penetrate it? But no, I can't completely get the light year thing, but I have a feeling for it when I see sunrays streaming through the trees. If you look hard, it looks like it's variable and constantly changing. That is how I imagine light years.
Posted by: Liz | July 18, 2007 at 09:02 PM