More about
Andromeda:
- Andromeda is the closest
galaxy to our own galaxy, "The Milky
Way"
It's about 2.5 Million light years away, 100,000
light years across, and contains about 1 Million
Million stars like our sun. (1 light year is 6
million million miles, or 10 million million
kilometres.)
- The Milky Way and Andromeda
are a pair of similar galaxies which rotate in
opposite directions. Both revolve very slowly. If
the Revolution inside Siobhan was happening at
the same rate, it would take about 250 million
years. The Milky Way from Andromeda is thought to
look almost the same as Andromeda appears to us.
In a sense, to look at Andromeda is to see
ourselves.
- It's almost certain that at
least one in a million of the stars in each
galaxy has planets with intelligent life like
Earth. That's a million in our galaxy and a
million in Andromeda. (There has been some doubt
in the past as to whether Earth has intelligent
life, but since Siobhan was discovered here we
now know that there is.)
- Andromeda is the most distant
object which can be seen by the human eye.
- Andromeda is heading straight
for us and will merge with our galaxy in about
5,000 million years, turning both galaxies into a
mess which doesn't look like 2 nice neat spirals
anymore.
- Click here
for a larger picture of Andromeda.
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| Big Bang Bollocks? Talking of
Galaxies, here's a British publication which explains
away the "Big Bang" theory, "Red
Shift", and "Dark Matter" all at once. I
never liked the idea of the Big Bang, and always thought
the "steady state" theory was a much nicer
idea. At last these people seem to have proved it by
saying that all objects, like me, you, Siobhan, and all
the atoms in the universe are expanding too, at the same
extremely slow rate as the space between the galaxies.
This means there's effectively no real expansion at all,
but instead there's what they call
"re-scaling".
Red Shift turns out to be a natural feature of any light
that has been travelling for a long time, and the
universe does not have to be expanding to explain it. The
Dark Matter which they can never find doesn't need to be
there, because you can explain the unusual way that
galaxies, like the one on the back of the album, revolve,
without it. And without a Big Bang you don't have to find
an excuse for God putting his finger down and creating
the universe at a particular time, and then not knowing
what happened before that.
Here's a link to some scans of the
publication Warning:There
are 13 pages and it's extremely scientific.
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