Robert_Stephens
Rookie
- Banned
- #61
Nuebarth,
Actually, you are correct on sending anything toward the 'Galactic plane'. The reason for this is several fold; at the speed of light, it would take roughly 39,000 years, since we are located here in our solar system that distance from the center core.
Two, at the fastest speed of anything we have built, and that is now the ancient Voyager 1, at a distance of 12.3 billion miles from the sun, drifting at coast velocity of some 82,000 MPH, it would reach the center of our galaxy in roughly 98.8 billion years and the Universe as we know it would have cycled again, 3 times over.
You are in error about "seeing" the Galactic core, however, as we can "see" the center with the Hubble Space Telescope and its quite easy to reconcile. Here it is:
And here is the details on this photo:
Spectacular Photos From The Revamped Hubble Space Telescope | Astronomy & Space Photography, Hubble Images | Space.com
Hope that is helpful.
Robert
Robert, I appreciate the beauty of the artificial "photograph" but you're horribly wrong. What you have shown us is an infrared light and X-ray light "computed and colored" representation of a photo.
With this imaginary photograph we can supposedly see "through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core of the Milky Way." It is interesting to look at, but it is not a photograph of the center of the Milky Way. It is just a representation based upon some data.
The reality is that we have no idea what is in that dust that prevents normal light from passing through to our eyes or the Hubble telescope. Nor can we catalog it. It is a mess of debris. Luckily we on Planet Earth do not have to pass through that as it looks like it is pretty damn thick.
Where we pass through the Galactic Plane, we hope that we do not hit something or something hits us. I suspect that several times in the past million years we did not fare so well. Those human population bottlenecks might be attestation to that. Other mass extinctions may have been related to passing through that zone in the Galaxy. Perhaps the Dinosaur mass extinction was related to an asteroid in the Galactic Plane rather than an asteroid from the belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Also, Robert, you have a misunderstanding in your reply to the OP. We do not need to send a probe into the Cosmic Core. We need to send a probe ahead of our solar system. That direction is not towards Pluto, but towards the direction of the galactic plane where we will be passing in two years. I would guess that would be at a right angle to Pluto. (Though I am not certain of the direction, if the solar system was flat with the galactic plane and we were moving towards the North Star, we would shoot our rocket towards our north with enough velocity to keep on heading in the direction that we want it. Remember also, that it would already have the speed that the solar system is approaching the Galactic Plane, so it would have been there way ahead of us had we launched it years ago. It could, at least, have given us a better idea of what awaits us....... be it a light display in the sky (i hope) or a thundering roar and death and destruction like 65 million years ago.
I am not sure what you are inferring, but the solar system does not move independent of its position in the galaxy on locale. It is called the 2nd Law of Celestial Dynamics. You are inferring, for some reason, the solar system breaks away, all of it, the 9 planets, the Asteroids, The Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt, and somehow we "pass" through to the core of the galaxy?
Or, you are saying we are going to go to the galactic "plane". This is also impossible and a meaningless statement. The Galactic plane is just that. We, our solar system, is revolving around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, making one orbit every 230,000,000 (230 million) years.
The equation for validation for this is as follows, where N=orbital velocity x distance/position on local:
N=£∆.32n/∫(∆230/ç∂≠Vn∑ø«C/Pi≈/µ
Lastly, The photo above is from HST and is taken in gamma, infrared, and red shift laurex, which sees through dust and other diffusions. It is an accurate image of the Milky Way's galactic core. You are in error.
This is what I do for a living.
Hope that is helpful.
Robert