All Things Must Come to an End

     I have enjoyed blogging over the past couple of years, but I really do not have the passion for it that I used to. I have decided to end my blogging career for a couple of reasons:

1. I like to do everything to the best of my abilities.

-Because I am very busy during the school year with school, skiing, snowboarding, music, and keeping the house going I have not been able to devote all my energy into blogging. I feel like this blog is a poor example of my writing abilities because I make all my posts in last minute circumstances.


2. My desire to blog has withered away.

-I used to enjoy writing for this blog, but now I dread post days. I hate writing when forced and I truly do not see why I should make myself do something when I don't need to do it.


3. I don't have 1,000,000 followers.

If more then 10 people actually read my blog, I would keep going for their sakes. Seeing as I don't have a huge fan base, I don't think I'll really be disappointing anyone.

I hope you enjoyed my posts in the past and I will keep my blog on the web for the occasional passerby, but my writing time has come to an end.

Did You Know? - 8 Awe Inspiring Facts about the Milky Way

                                                    Certain Certitude #21

     Only two votes were cast in this past week's poll. Therefore there was a tie for what the best season of the year is: summer and winter! Check out this week's poll to your right ----> Now here are 8 interesting facts about our galaxy:

1. 1. It’s warped. The Milky Way is a disk about 120,000 light years across, with a central bulge that has a diameter of 12,000 light years. The disk is far from perfectly flat though. What warped it? Two of the galaxy’s neighbors – the Large and Small Magellanic clouds – have been pulling on the dark matter in the Milky Way like in a game of galactic tug-of-war. The tugging sets up a sort of oscillating frequency that pulls on the hydrogen gas (of which the Milky Way has lots of).
   2. It has a halo, but you can’t directly see it. The Milky Way has a halo of dark matter that makes up over 90% of its mass. Yes, 90%. That means that all of what we can see (with the naked eye or telescopes) makes up less than 10% of the mass of the Milky Way. Now, it doesn’t have a halo like those old cartoon characters that die, sprout wings and play a harp in the clouds. The halo is actually invisible, though we know it exists by running simulations of what the Milky Way would look like and how fast stars inside the galaxy’s disk orbit the center. The heavier it is, the faster they should be orbiting. If you assume that the galaxy is made up only of matter that we can see, then you get a rotation rate for the stars that is well below what it should be, so the rest is made up of what is elusively called “dark matter,” or matter that only interacts gravitationally (so far as we know) with “normal matter”.
   3. It has over 200 billion stars. As galaxies go, the Milky Way is a middleweight. The largest galaxy known, IC 1101, has over 100 trillion stars, and other large galaxies can have more than a trillion stars. Smaller galaxies like the aforementioned Large Magellanic Cloud, have about 10 billion stars. The Milky Way has between 200-400 billion stars, but when you look up into the night sky the most you can see from any one point on the Earth is about 2,500. We aren’t stuck with this many stars forever, though, because the Milky Way is constantly losing stars – through supernovae – and producing stars, netting about seven stars per year.
   
   4. It’s really dusty and gassy. You may not think so by looking at it, but the Milky Way is full of dust and gas. And when I say full of dust, I mean that we can only see out about 6,000 light years into the disk of our own galaxy in the visible spectrum, and the galaxy is about 100,000 light years across! The dust and gas makes up a whopping 10-15% of the “normal matter” in the galaxy, with the remainder being stars. The thickness of the dust deflects visible light, but infrared light can pass through the dust, which makes infrared telescopes like the Spitzer Space Telescope extremely valuable tools in mapping and studying the galaxy. Spitzer can peer through the dust to give us extraordinarily clear views of what is going on at the heart of the galaxy and in star-forming regions.
   5. Every picture you’ve seen of the Milky Way from above is either another galaxy or an artist’s interpretation. We can’t take a picture of the Milky Way from above (yet) because we are inside the galactic disk, about 26,000 light years from the galactic center. This means that any pretty pictures you see of a spiral galaxy with elegant arms that is supposedly the Milky Way is either a picture of another spiral galaxy, or the rendering of a talented artist. Imaging the Milky Way from above is a long, long way off; however, this doesn’t mean that we can’t take breathtaking images of the Milky Way from our vantage point!
   6. There is a black hole at the center. Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at the center. Ours is no exception. The center of our galaxy is called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), and it houses a black hole with a mass of 40,000 Suns that is 14 million miles across (about the size of Mercury’s orbit). But this is just the black hole itself. All of the mass trying to get into the black hole – called the accretion disk – forms a disk that has a mass of 4 million Suns, and would fit inside the orbit of the Earth. Though like other black holes, Sgr A* tries to consume anything that happens to be nearby, star formation has been detected near this black hole behemoth.
   7. It’s part of the Virgo Supercluster, a grouping of galaxies within 150 million light years. As big as it is, the Milky Way is part of an even bigger structure called a supercluster. Superclusters are groupings of galaxies on very large scales (100s of millions of light years). In between these superclusters are large voids of space where any space traveler would encounter very little in the way of galaxies or matter. Our close neighbors include the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and the Andromeda Galaxy (the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way), and along with about 30 other galaxies this group of galaxies makes up what is called the Local Group. But as you get further on out, on the scale of hundreds of millions of light years, the Milky Way can be seen to be just a small part of a large grouping of galaxies 150 million light years in diameter called the Virgo Supercluster.
   8. It’s on the move. The Milky Way, along with everything else, is moving through space, and puts to shame anything from everyday life that one could compare its speed to. The Earth moves around the Sun, the Sun around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is part of the Local Group, which is moving relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation – the radiation left over from the Big Bang (you know, when God said, "Let there be light." AND BANG! There it was!), which is a convenient reference point to use when determining the velocity of things in the Universe. The Local Group is calculated to move relative to the CMB at about 600 km/s (2,200,000 km/h), which is pretty darn fast!