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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)
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)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius Lirath Q. Pynnor
Seven arms in the galaxy? Is that correct? That seems like an extraordinarily large number. -- Decumanus 23:02, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)
IIRC, the Milky Way is more specifically a barred-spiral galaxy, rather than a spiral one. This would imply two arms. See the beginning of the galaxy article for a reference. -- Anonymous
Correct, the Milky Way is a barred spiral but a barred spiral has more than two arms, since the bar splits up into several arms. The diagram in the article is very misleading. A more accurate, scientific diagram can be found here: http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/CGPS/press/aas00/pr/pr_14012000/iconmw_plan.gif Svanimpe 16:20, 17 jul 2004 (CET)
How can any of you be sure there are any arms to it,it is impossible to be certain form earth's POV. Dudtz 11/1/05 4:10 PM EST
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)
I'm confused, why should the galaxy itself be visible from earth? even if we're looking at the disk 'the long way' it's still several orders of magnitude larger than we are.. no matter what the distance...
This needs to be changed. "To the normal to the.." doesn't make sense. --Viriditas 09:20, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)
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)
I feel splitting the two would be appropriate. Astronomers and astronomy textbooks do distinguish between them. Splitting them is equivalent to how there are separate pages for the Sun and solar deity (or list of solar deities). As with the Sun example, the Milky Way Galaxy is the modern scientific understanding, while the Milky Way is the protoscience used by various cultures prior to modern science. --zandperl 02:18, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
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
Tall order considering that we can't really leave our galaxy to take a picture of it. :) I suggest one of the following:
Two reasons for my recommendation: IR penetrates much of the dust/gas so we get a better idea of what's behind those clouds we can't see through, and the images are public domain. --zandperl 02:57, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
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:
What else should we have? Worldtraveller 12:16, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Requested images:
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)
The sun's orbit around the galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions.
Is there a reference for this statement? As I recall, an elliptical orbit is only expected for a spherically symmetric mass distribution, including the special case of only a central mass (Kepler's Laws). An essentially disk-like distribution of mass, as is our galaxy, would result in a "merry-go-round" orbit: an ellipse with vertical pogo-stick motion superimposed. --zandperl 12:50, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
The Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter .. and about 250,000 light years in circumference.
Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption about how circular the galaxy is, wouldn't the circumference of the galaxy be closer to 300,000 ly? I'm basing this off the assumption that . If it were perfectly circular, wouldn't the Milky Way have a circumference of approximately 314,159 ly, which can be comfortably rounded down to "about 300,000 light years"? --mpeg4codec 16:20, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
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)
It would be nice to expand the outer arm stuff referred to here (I couldn't find anything on the Internet about it): WilliamKF 22:31, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
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.
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)
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)
I removed the statement that the distance between the local arm and the Perseus arm is 2000 lyrs. It is not supported by the given reference, http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/CGPS/press/aas00/pr/pr_14012000/pr_14012000map1.html and in fact, given that the galaxy's diameter is 10^5 lyrs, the map given there suggests that the distance is much larger. AxelBoldt 01:40 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
The recent change from Local Bubble to Local Fluff, although technically correct, is not necessarily an "either-or" The Sun is still well within the Local Bubble. The Local Fluff is also known as (perhaps more within the field) as the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC). Recent evidence suggests the LIC is not alone (surprise) and the acronym CLIC has also started to be used for "Complex/Cluster of Local Interstellar Clouds". --mh 21:28, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)
These 2 sentences appear to contradict each other:
"The orbital speed of stars in the Milky Way does not depend much on the distance to the center: it is always between 200 and 250 km/s for the Sun's neighbours [1] (http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/123/lecture-2/mass.html). Hence the orbital period is approximately proportional to the distance from the star to the Galaxy's center (without the power 1.5 which applies in the case of a central mass)."
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.
Since there was just an edit changing age to 13600 bya, here are sources for 13600 mya:
A thought -- confusion could have resulted from the variation in use of "," vs "." for a separator. Lomn | Talk 21:10:47, 2005-08-17 (UTC)
The universe has no age.Dudtz 11/1/05 4:11 PM EST
I've edited the paragraph in question to reflect the fact that we are discussing the age of the oldest stars in the galaxy. I'm not sure it has any meaning at all to talk about the age of the Galaxy as a whole. I'd suggest moving this section to a less prominent place in the article. Thoughts? Chrislintott 10:56, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
so yeah it is really cool dont u think haha