Latest Posts by psychicmrdata - Page 6

Our Galaxy is Caught Up in a Giant Cosmic Cobweb! 🕸️

If we could zoom waaaay out, we would see that galaxies and galaxy clusters make up large, fuzzy threads, like the strands of a giant cobweb. But we'll work our way out to that. First let's start at home and look at our planet's different cosmic communities.

Our home star system

Earth is one of eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — that orbit the Sun. But our solar system is more than just planets; it also has a lot of smaller objects.

An asteroid belt circles the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Beyond Neptune is a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt. This is where dwarf planets like Pluto and Makemake are found and is likely the source of short-period comets (like Haley’s comet), which orbit the Sun in less than 200 years.

Scientists think that even farther out lies the Oort Cloud, also a likely source of comets. This most distant region of our solar system is a giant spherical shell storing additional icy space debris the size of mountains, or larger! The outer edge of the Oort Cloud extends to about 1.5 light-years from the Sun — that’s the distance light travels in a year and a half (over 9 trillion miles).

Sometimes asteroids or comets get ejected from these regions and end up sharing an orbit with planets like Jupiter or even crossing Earth’s orbit. There are even interstellar objects that have entered the inner solar system from even farther than the Oort Cloud, perhaps coming all the way from another star!

Our home galaxy

Let's zoom out to look at the whole Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars. Many are found in the galaxy’s disk — the pancake-shaped part of a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms lie. The brightest and most massive stars are found in the spiral arms, close to their birth places. Dimmer, less massive stars can be found sprinkled throughout the disk. Also found throughout the spiral arms are dense clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The Sun lies in a small spiral arm called the Orion Spur.

The Milky Way’s disk is embedded in a spherical “halo” about 120,000 light-years across. The halo is dotted with globular clusters of old stars and filled with dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit enough light for us to directly detect it, but we know it’s there because without its mass our galaxy doesn’t have enough gravity to hold together!

Our galaxy also has several orbiting companion galaxies ranging from about 25,000 to 1.4 million light-years away. The best known of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are visible to the unaided eye from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.

Our galactic neighborhood

The Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, are just two members of a small group of galaxies called the Local Group. They and the other members of the group, 50 to 80 smaller galaxies, spread across about 10 million light-years.

The Local Group lies at the outskirts of an even larger structure. It is just one of at least 100 groups and clusters of galaxies that make up the Virgo Supercluster. This cluster of clusters spans about 110 million light-years!

Galaxies aren’t the only thing found in a galaxy cluster, though. We also find hot gas, as shown above in the bright X-ray light (in pink) that surrounds the galaxies (in optical light) of cluster Abell 1413, which is a picturesque member of a different supercluster. Plus, there is dark matter throughout the cluster that is only detectable through its gravitational interactions with other objects.

The Cosmic Web

The Virgo Supercluster is just one of many, many other groups of galaxies. But the universe’s structure is more than just galaxies, clusters, and the stuff contained within them.

For more than two decades, astronomers have been mapping out the locations of galaxies, revealing a filamentary, web-like structure. This large-scale backbone of the cosmos consists of dark matter laced with gas. Galaxies and clusters form along this structure, and there are large voids in between.

The scientific visualizations of this “cosmic web” look a little like a spider web, but that would be one colossal spider! <shudder>

And there you have the different communities that define Earth’s place in the universe. Our tiny planet is a small speck on a crumb of that giant cosmic web!

Want to learn even more about the structures in the universe? Check out our Cosmic Distance Scale!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.

Playing Doom on a pregnancy tester.

why? because. 

love how wholesome this is

You ever invite your coworker to watch you give birth just to spite a racist

upcoming characters in 2.3

ARATAKI ITTO ♡ GOROU

there it is, again

that funny feeling

Moonchase beiguang bickering <3

don’t talk to guoba he’s angy

I am OBSESSED with this tiktok

highly recommend the anarchychess subreddit especially lately

me playing any video game: *does not touch the block button at all throughout the game*

💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯

Who wants to join Gouba's cult with me?

I believe in Gouba supremacy

I mean Jesus fucking Christ this is not right

kekkai sensen ED - genshin impact version [anniversary stream] / liyue ed.

They're rivals 👉👈

I honestly think that the reason that twitter and tik tok think that tumblr is dead is that it does not have an algorythym that spoon feeds you content in the same way, there's no fyp and there's no news feed in the same way and people come here not realising they actually have to follow creators to see content.

🤣

The little look between Chekov and Yeoman Landon (and even the security officer behind them). What does it mean? is it:

a) Chekov has been telling everyone that Kirk and Spock are in love but it was hard to get others to believe. This is his, "I told you so" face.

b) They, and most of the crew, ship their two superior officers and are inwardly gushing, excited to share the details after the mission is all over.

c) They have a betting pool on how much Kirk can flirt with their oblivious XO. Big points for the skin-to-skin contact there so someone just won a lot.

Take care kid XD

LOL I guess I'm 20 too

u know whats wild. everyone on here like 20 and when i first joined everyone was like 14 15. u ask anybody n they been here for years. nobody new on here. staff locked the doors n were all Stuck Inside

Mihoyo really said, "you're mad about anniversary rewards? We'll just confirm all your ships and ship headcanons. That should fix it" I'm not complaining but nskxjaksah

Data: Finds solution like a boss

Damage report, Mister LaForge