Talk:Milky Way/Archive 1

message: I'm no expert on the matter, but I just read this article, which seems very important to me. Seems like our galaxy isn't the standard spiral at all. Here's the link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7854 80.140.218.64 12:41, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Important News

message: A logged-out user posted "The centre of the Milky is a region called Stagitarius A*."  - is this correct, besides the spelling?  The interesting choice of spelling leads me to wonder if it was a troll attempt.  --Pakaran 05:49, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Sag A*

message: Seven arms in the galaxy? Is that correct? That seems like an extraordinarily large number. -- Decumanus 23:02, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arms? 

message: Most pages on the Milky Way, like this one, fail to confirm my suspicion that the river of stars rotates as the night progresses.  I think that is what I am told in Chinese poetry, the translation of which is my main business, but I always like to check facts like that.  We are so caught up in the views that modern technology gives us that we forget to remember what the ancients saw and wrote about.
Yes, too true.
Because the earth rotates, the stars of the Milky Way (and just about everything else in the sky) appear to move from east to west (rotating counterclockwise around Polaris, and rotating clockwise around the Southern Cross).
You cancel this rotation by slowly turning your head or the telescope in the opposite direction. Many telescopes have a equatorial mount, designed to make this easier to do.
Then you can see that the stars of the Milky Way (except for the sun) and the stars of all other galaxies appear to stay perfectly motionless.
Because this view has been almost exactly the same over the last few millennia, astronomers get tremendously excited when there is even the tiniest amount of change. So they spend lots of time talking about these changes (the Zodiac is the sun's yearly motion relative to the stars; the motion of the planets and the asteroids; supernova; rotating binary stars; satellites; etc.).
--DavidCary 22:03, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Go outside at night and look up. thx1138 12:29, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  We don't look at the sky all night anymore 

message: I'm wondering whether this article should be split in two, one being the milky river bit, with the attendant history, and another purely about our Galaxy. They would be Milky Way and Milky Way Galaxy, so that Milky Way can be used by regular people wanting to know about the glowing river in the sky, and its nebulous characteristics, but not about astrophysics or whatnot. The other can be about the characteristics of our galaxy. 132.205.15.43 01:56, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That'd be silly. It's like having one article on the big yellow really bright thingy that's up in the sky during the day, and anther article on the star at the center of our solar system --Ctachme 05:36, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's separated in the Japanese Wikipedia. It would be akin to the separation as Sun versus Solar System. Or Alpha Centauri versus the various components (A,B,C (Proxima)), or Eta Carinae versus Carina Nebula; besides, the Milky Way is a much more non-astronomical way of thinking of the sky versus the Milky Way Galaxy. The great swath of light above our heads is a significant feature that is not equivalent to the Galaxy which it is part of. 132.205.15.43 01:44, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: As there hasn't been any objection, I am doing so.  Milky Way Galaxy will be the astronomical, while Milky Way will talk about the mythology.  --zandperl 15:41, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Milky Way: Galaxy vs silvery river in the sky 

message: Can't there be a photo of the Milky Way on this page that isn't X-ray or a diagram or something? Scorpionman 7 July 2005 11:32 (UTC)
As a general user of Wikipedia, the first thing I thought of when reading this article was that it needs an actual image of the Milky Way
:Worth contacting Axel Mellinger ?  He doesn't seem to specify any terms of use, he may be willing to license a version of his fantastic panorama under the GFDL.  I could consider releasing this image under GFDL if it would be useful, although it's not terribly representative of the whole milky way. Worldtraveller 12:16, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need of Image 

message: A while ago it was suggested to me that this article is one that has rich potential for becoming featured, but currently wouldn't make the grade.  I'd love to see this get to featured status, but feel it might need substantial restructing and expanding.  I have been thinking about a possible structure for a revised article and thought I would float it here and see what people think.  I could see the article looking like this:
# Intro section
# History of understanding
#: Certainly a summary of a main article but outlining the progress of thought from inexplicable milky way to disc-shaped object containing the entire universe to just one of many galaxies to our present knowledge.
# Formation
#: Current understanding of the formation of this galaxy.
# Structure
#: Good content here already, details of possible bar, spiral arms, bulge, disk and halo
# Age
# Contents
#: Outline of the main constituents, ie stars, open clusters, globular clusters, GMCs, etc, with notes on how each is distributed
# Rotation
#: Rotation curve, evidence for dark matter
# Location of the Solar System
#: How we determine where abouts the solar system is
# Satellite galaxies
#: Brief outline of the coeval dwarfs
What else should we have? Worldtraveller 12:16, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: This article

message: Requested images:
# Milky Way ... the swath of light in the night sky, preferably framing Orion
# http://www.news.wisc.edu/news/images/Milky_Way_galaxy_sun05.jpg something like this ( related to: http://www.news.wisc.edu/11405.html )
# Milky Way subgroup schematical layout
* 132.205.44.43 19:01, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ReqImage 

message: The orbital speed of stars in the Milky Way does not depend much on the distance to the center: it is always between 20 and 25 km/s for the Sun's neighbours [3].
The problem with this statement is that the Sun's neighbors are all roughly the same distance from the center of the Milky Way, so regardless of whether it's a function of distance or not they'll all have the same orbital speed.  --zandperl 02:41, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orbital speeds 

message: The diameter of the Milky Way is listed as 80,000 ly, but I believe it's closer to 120,000 lightyears since the discovery of an extra, outlying spiral arm (not containing visible stars, but with large amounts of neutral hydrogen) and a ring of stars wrapped around the galaxy. I am searching for sources, but are the ring of stars and the starless spiral arm known to you? DaMatriX 20:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diameter 

message: I removed the translation of "Milky Way" in those three Asian languages.  They are not written in the same characters and in Korean's case, there is a different meaning.
*Chinese: 银河系 yín hé xì (galaxy system or silver river system)
*Japanese: 銀河系 zingakei (galaxy system or silver river system)
*Korean: 우리 은하 uri unha (our galaxy)
I'm not sure how to reconcile all this. However they all have "silver river" in their translations (yín hé, zinga, unha). But saying "silver river galaxy" is redundant since "silver river" is galaxy, apparently. I am thinking that these translations would be more appopriate in galaxy, but I am not sure about Chinese treatment of the word, because the Chinese article is named 河外星系 hé wài xing xì  --Chris S. 05:37, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese, Japanese, and Korean translation removed 

message: Isn't it ironic that we named our galaxy the Milky Way Galaxy.  Then F. Mars created the Milky Way candy bar.  And now our galaxy is now known to be a barred spiral galaxy with a bar at the center.  This is what I think of when my power goes out!  Check this out if you don't get what i'm talking about! — Hurricane Devon ( Talk ) 12:16, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have a question.  What are the main arms to come of the ends of the bars? — Hurricane Devon ( Talk ) 01:44, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I found out.  This sais the main arms to come off the bars of the Milky Way are the Norma-Cygnus Arm and the Sagittarius Arm.— Hurricane Devon ( Talk ) 14:01, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ironic  

message: :I have a question.  What are the main arms to come of the ends of the bars? — Hurricane Devon ( Talk ) 01:44, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I found out.  This sais the main arms to come off the bars of the Milky Way are the Norma-Cygnus Arm and the Sagittarius Arm.— Hurricane Devon ( Talk ) 14:01, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about bar 

message: So if I get it right, the Milky Way Galaxy is about the same age as the universe (some 13 billion years) as a whole? That doesn't make sense. It can't be created at the same time.
:Universe: 13,700 +/- 200 million; Milky Way: 13,600 +/- 800 million
:This is consistent with the Milky Way being a first generation galaxy whose original stars are only a few hundred million years younger than the universe itself.  Obviously it won't actually be older than or the same age as the big bang.  Dragons flight 13:16, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
::Right. It does make sense. I just didn't know our Galaxy came to be that soon after the Big Bang. Thanks!
:::Also, globular clusters within our galaxy are only a slight bit younger than the galaxy and universe--for a while astronomers thought the GC's were _older_ than the universe!  Pretty much EVERYTHING formed right after the Big Bang.  Check out the timeline.  --zandperl 02:29, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Is it also possible it's due to the different use of "billion" throughout the world?  --zandperl 02:29, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Age