Gah! I couldn't even make it past the *second paragraph* before I was complaining to myself. A *trillion* stars in the Milky Way!?! Where do they get this stuff?
This is a new record for them. Usually it takes me until the fourth or fifth paragraph before I get so angry that I have to stop.
I know this is going to be the first thread in the OO EBG that gets no responses, so I'll put in this related tid bit from yesterday's Page A Day Calendar entry:
Thursday October 21, 2004 wrote:SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Who coined the word "scientist"?
The word "scientist" was coined in 1833 by British scholar William Whewell. Until then, scientists were called "natural philosophers" or "men of science." Whewell also invented the words "anode," "cathode," and "ion" for British scientist Michael Faraday.
Maybe they should retitle to "New Natural Philosophers." Then I wouldn't be fooled into clicking on their freaking webpage...
Grrr...
~Neal
"Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet." — Elontra
The exact number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy is virtually impossable to determine, but best estimates put the number at over 100 billion stars. The reason its so hard to determine the number of stars is three fold. First the galaxy is so large we can't really use measurements in miles or kilometers, we use instead light years. The distance light travels in one year is one light year. The Milky Way is about 80,000 light years across. As we look towards the center of the Milky Way, in the direction of the constellation Sagitarius, we must look through millions of stars. Try looking into a crowd of people when you're part of the crowd. Now try to count how many people are there. It's quite a task.
Now lets add the vast quantities of interstellar dust that lie between the stars. Visual light can't pass through the millions and millions of miles of dust. We turn to radio astronomy, which uses the long wavelength radio waves from stellar activity. These radio waves aren't absorbed by the interstellar dust so we can use them to get a better picture of the size and structure of our galaxy. This picture is of a galaxy that looks somewhat like a giant pinwheel, rotating once about every 200 million years.
The final problem to take into account is that not all of the stars in our galaxy may put out enough visable or radio energy to be seen at all. What you can't see you can't count, so scientist must look at how the galaxy behaves and what the can see to estimate how many stars must be there to explain what they observe
Now how many new stars have we found in the past 10 years that are due to increase of detection ability? How close were they to us ? I feel a *trillion* is way to high. How many stars did we say there were 100 ,50 and 25 years ago?
The system used in the U.S. is not as logical as that used in other countries (like Great Britain, France, and Germany). In these other countries, a billion (bi meaning two) has twice as many zeros as a million, and a trillion (tri meaning three) has three times as many zeros as a million, etc.
To be fair, though, they then go on to say:
But the scientific community seems to use the American system.
So maybe the guys at New Scientist should get over their Limeyness and be a little more, erm, scientific.
Edit: Wait on, they are using the scientific trillion. They're still a factor of ten over current estimates. Numbers are so confusing.
So right now most people agree that it's 200,000,000,000 to 400,000,000,000 stars. They are saying 1,000,000,000,000. So that would be 5 times as much to 2 1/2 times as much. I think I got that right.
