Stellar mass of universe may be three times current estimates

[웃 910]

That's 3X a number nobody can understand. Recap:

1 sun (1 star) = 1 million 300 thousand earths (thats a lot of earths to make 1 star)

Closest star to earth = the sun = 93 million miles away = about 8.5 minutes away from the earth (traveling at speed of light)

The sun is becoming 10% more luminous every billion years. In fact, within just a billion years, the heat from the Sun will be so intense that liquid water won't exist on the surface of the Earth.

VY Canis Majoris (1 star) = Radius alone is 1,800 suns across

VJ Canis Majoris is roughly 4,900 light years away from earth.

Milky Way Galaxy = 1 galaxy

100 to 500 billion galaxies = 1 universe

Nearest galaxy to earth = 23,000 light years away

Furthest galaxy to earth = More than 13 billion light years away (pack your luggage, wait about 30 years at the airport, get in plane, pilot shows up 140 years later, fly for 400 years, stop at near planet for a 70,000 year layover, tour new airport for 170,000 years, take a rest for 1,000,000 years, get on new plane, rest another 4 million years, stop at new planet, have a 60,000 year lunch break, get on new plane, fly for another 3 billion years, rest for another 250,000 years AND YOU'VE ONLY TRAVELED FOR 3.55 billion years (still have about 10 billion years to travel). PS: That is just to 1 of hundreds of billions of galaxies. And we are not talking a speed of 10 mph, or 1000 mph, or 500,000 mph, but rather a speed of 186,000 miles per second the entire time!

So wouldn't God have to be the size of 100s of billions of earths just to take a tour of His creation? Doesn't it seem petty to point to 1 single being as a controller and creator and master of the universe? To me, after I examine the numbers, the sizes, the speeds, I think that saying God is something very small and petty. Humans have not been around for very long considering the earth is over 4.5 billion years old (give/take 100 million years):

Are you telling me it is a HUGE COINCIDENCE that God spoke with the scientifically challenged/retarded people of 50AD when there was barely 100 million people around? And now that there are 70X that amount of population not one single person has heard or seen from God. Logical reasoning tells me that you would have more people hearing/seeing God than less. And yet not 1 person in modern society has audibly or visually seen God as was so common 2000 years ago.

PS: All the usual trolls that want to say I am this, I am that, give it up, stop posting about religion: G.F.Y.

New star count: 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

WASHINGTON - The night sky may be a lot starrier than we thought.A study suggests the universe could have triple the number of stars scientists previously calculated. For those of you counting at home, the new estimate is 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's 300 sextillion.

The study questions a key assumption that astronomers often use: that most galaxies have the same properties as our Milky Way. And that's creating a bit of a stink among astronomers who want a more orderly cosmos.

It's one of two studies being published online Wednesday in the journal Nature that focus on red dwarf stars, the most common stars in the universe. The study that offers the new estimate on stars is led by a Yale University astronomer. He calculates that there are far more red dwarfs than previously thought, and that inflates the total star count.

A second study led by a Harvard University scientist focuses on a distant "super Earth" planet and sees clues to the content of its atmosphere - the first of this kind of data for this size planet. It orbits a red dwarf.

Red dwarf stars - about a fifth the size of our sun - burn slowly and last much longer than the bigger, brighter stars, such as the sun in the center of our solar system, said Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum. His study looks at how many red dwarfs are in elliptical-shaped galaxies.

When scientists had estimated previously how many stars there were in the universe, they assumed that all galaxies had the same ratio

of dwarf stars as in our galaxy, which is spiral-shaped. Much of our understanding of the universe is based on observations inside our Milky Way and then extrapolated to other galaxies.But about one-third of the galaxies in the universe are not spiral, but elliptical, and van Dokkum found they aren't really made up the same way as ours.

Using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, van Dokkum and a colleague gazed into eight other distant, but elliptical, galaxies and looked at their hard-to-differentiate light signatures. The scientists calculated that elliptical galaxies have more of those dwarf stars. A lot more.

"We're seeing 10 or 20 times more stars than we expected," van Dokkum said. By his calculations, that triples the number of estimated stars from 100 sextillion to 300 sextillion.

For the past month, astronomers have been buzzing about van Dokkum's findings, and many aren't too happy about it, said astronomer Richard Ellis of Caltech.

Van Dokkum's paper challenges the assumption of "a more orderly universe" and gives credence to "the idea that the universe is more complicated than we think," Ellis said. "It's a little alarmist."

Ellis said it is too early to tell if van Dokkum is right or wrong, but it is shaking up the field "like a cat among pigeons."

Van Dokkum agreed, saying, "Frankly, it's a big pain."

Ellis said the new study does make sense. Its biggest weakness might be its assumption that the chemical composition of dwarf stars is the same in elliptical galaxies as in the Milky Way. That might be wrong, Ellis said. Even if it is, it would mean there are only five times more red dwarf stars in elliptical galaxies than scientists previously thought, instead of 10 or 20, van Dokkum said.

Slightly closer to home, at least in our own galaxy, one dwarf star has astronomers at Harvard taking another step in their search for life. They were able to home in on the atmosphere of a planet circling that star using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The planet lives up to the word alien.

Their paper reports that this giant planet's atmosphere is either dense with sizzling water vapor like a souped-up steam bath, or it's full of hazy, choking hydrogen and helium clouds with a slightly blue tint. The latter is more likely, say the researchers and others not involved in the study.

While scientists have been able to figure out the atmosphere of gas giants the size of Jupiter or bigger, this is a first for the type of planet called a super Earth - something with a mass 2 to 10 times Earth's. It is more comparable to Neptune and circles a star about 42 light years from Earth. A light year is nearly 6 trillion miles.

And while this planet is nowhere near livable - it's about 440 degrees (about 225 degrees Celsius) - characterizing its atmosphere is a big step toward understanding potentially habitable planets outside our solar system, said study chief author Jacob Bean at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"You wouldn't want to be there. It would be unpleasant," said study co-author Eliza Kempton of the University of California Santa Clara.

Bean and Kempton looked at the light spectrum signature from the large planet as it passed in front of the dwarf star, and the result led to two possible conclusions: steam bath or haze.

The steam bath is the more interesting possibility because water is key to life, said outside scientist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

But an upcoming and still unpublished study by Kempton and Bryce Croll at the University of Toronto points more toward a hydrogen-helium atmosphere, several astronomers said.

Read more:http://www.pasadenas...0#ixzz16tpXIvVB

Edited December 1, 2010 by Lord Infamous

[The_Dude 1,142]

Pssst. Lord Infamous, please update this thread.

[Dakine 26]

Where's number 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,001?

Edited December 1, 2010 by Dakine

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Where's number 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,001?

Just slightly north of our federal debt.

Oops, wrong thread.

[Ban Hammer 12,879]

Just slightly north of our federal debt.

Oops, wrong thread.