Low cost astronomy

[spooker]

https://www.castanet.net/edition/news-s ... htm#345893
Fake news!
Sad state when a old washed up guy like me with no astrophysics degree and the IQ of a mouse has to ask....In what universe is the Andromeda galaxy 22 million light years from Earth? Seriously?
Its 2.1 to 2.5 million light years away.
Castanet author might want to look at that....

Did you report it as a typo?

[oldtrucker]

^^^ Not quite that smart.

[spooker]

^^^ Not quite that smart.

All good I submitted one with some links to source materials ... good catch!

[oldtrucker]

^^^ Not quite that smart.

All good I submitted one with some links to source materials ... good catch!

Not the first time I've caught mistakes by the author....but this one was so blatant I kinda had to point it out. The others were minor mistakes that the average reader would have no idea either way so I didn't mention them. I mean, doesn't everybody know it's 2.1 to 2.5 M/ly away?
Another thing if talking about the Andromeda galaxy....the central black hole makes the Milky Way's Sagittarius A Star look like a mustard seed to a basketball. It's important

[spooker]

All good I submitted one with some links to source materials ... good catch!

Not the first time I've caught mistakes by the author....but this one was so blatant I kinda had to point it out. The others were minor mistakes that the average reader would have no idea either way so I didn't mention them. I mean, doesn't everybody know it's 2.1 to 2.5 M/ly away?

My starchart isn't always kept in my easy recall memory storage ... and much of it actually comes from pop culture references from consuming scifi by the greats (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke etc) ... so I bow to you ... feel free to share more, I prefer authors who properly research what they are relaying ...

[oldtrucker]

feel free to share more

Okay....
Take some time with this one ... just a crazy theory I have....
Time and gravity are the same, we are just looking at things wrong by trying to separate the two.

[Beerhunter341]

I"ve always enjoyed telescopes and looking at planets and stars. I have been using an iPhone app called ...wait for it.... Planets.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/planets/id305793334

It has been a fantastic app. Check it out if you haven't already

[spooker]

Not the first time I've caught mistakes by the author....but this one was so blatant I kinda had to point it out. The others were minor mistakes that the average reader would have no idea either way so I didn't mention them. I mean, doesn't everybody know it's 2.1 to 2.5 M/ly away?
Another thing if talking about the Andromeda galaxy....the central black hole makes the Milky Way's Sagittarius A Star look like a mustard seed to a basketball. It's important

You're post has paid off ... the article in question has been updated with the correct "2.5 million" value

[oldtrucker]

I always enjoy reading Mr. Tappings articles.
I'm glad there is a astronomy section to this website
I guess I'm nerd enough to pay attention to the numbers and details. Once a person has a vast amount of data in their heads like a pro astronomer, making a typo of 22 million when they meant 2.2 million would be pretty easy to do and overlook.

[oldtrucker]

.the central black hole makes the Milky Way's Sagittarius A Star look like a mustard seed to a basketball.

Correction.....The holes were behind the galaxy 2.6 B ly https://scitechdaily.com/supermassive-b ... da-galaxy/

Here is a cool calculator for the Schwarzchild limit of black holes https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ ... ild-radius

If Earth were to become a black hole, it would be 17 mm across.
It's important

[oldtrucker]

The other superman jumping fence thread got me thinking about using him in a physics thought experiment. Superman is capable of exceeding the speed of light therefore not effected by gravity or mass -he is strong enough to withstand the force of the gravity of a black hole.
If superman took a position half a meter away from the event horizon or Schwarzschild radius of the smallest known black hole-XTE-J1 650-500 with a diameter of about 13 km ,would he be effected by the effects of gravitational time dilation?
If he wanted to, he could step past the event horizon into the black hole then quickly step out in under a second. When he did come out , would the universe even exist? Would it be gone including the black hole he was in from Hawking Radiation and/or quantum tunneling.?
If he stayed above the event horizon, he would appear frozen in time forever to a outside observer, and from his perspective looking out, time and events will be moving in a fast blur.
What would happen if he took a position exactly right mid way on the event horizon.?Would half of him be able to stay in the universe although heavily effected by time dilation ?. Would the other half of him be lost in a remote far, far, future black hole degenerate era.?...His left side...in this verse. His right side... quantum tunneled out of existence in a googleplex years times a googleplex years....

[Jlabute]

2.5M lightyears away? You guys must be talking about andromeda (M31).
An interesting note is if your eyes were sensitive enough, you’d see M31 is much larger than the moon as it occupies the sky. The moon has an angular diameter of 0.52 degrees, while M31 has an angular diameter of about 3.2 degrees. It’s huge. Sometimes you look up and think it’s gonna squash you.

[alanjh595]

The Andromeda Galaxy (IPA: /ænˈdrɒmɪdə/), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224 and originally the Andromeda Nebula (see below), is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years (770 kiloparsecs) from Earth and the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way.[6] The galaxy's name stems from the area of Earth's sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which itself is named after the Ethiopian (or Phoenician) princess who was the wife of Perseus in Greek mythology.

Capture.JPG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda ... laxy_2.jpg

[oldtrucker]

^^^Interesting fact when looking a pics of galaxies...you can't see any individual stars in them....The stars you see are always stars in our own galaxy in the forefront- not in the galaxy being pictured.

[Jlabute]

Yeah, and you’d think existing inside the arm of a galaxy might even make it more visible, but not so much. You can see a faint Milky Way across the night sky on a moonless clear night away from the city. You still have to take a picture to see it well.