How did they do that - 'measure their velocities' I mean? How on earth (no pun intended) can anyone measure how fast a galaxy is going?
The speed of the galaxy is measured by observing the light spectrum coming from the distant galaxy. The properties of spectrum change due to the motion of a galaxy with respect to the Earth. In other words, you can say that the spectrum contains the information about the motion of a galaxy. The Doppler Effect is used to determine the speed of the galaxy.
Well...considering I have done measurement to this effect personally...yeah, I believe it. Also I tend to research in order to confirm my data and in the process gain understanding and knowledge. You should try it as it is actually fun.
Yeah, I get sucked into these guys from time to time. Up in the political section, it's typically aholes and dumb guys, but down here I think it's primarily mental disease. It's literally not their fault, but it can't be reasoned with. Then again neither can the dumb guys in the political section, though I don't mind unloading on those guys.
Personally, I find it best to think lf these as free entertainment and mind push ups. This one in particular provides quite a bit of fun even though it probably does not know it.
This is conjecture, just as what I said about the future is conjecture. You do not know, and neither do I. The difference? I admit to the conjecture. You cannot. And that could be a facet of the debunker mentality as opposed to an honest skeptic.
It's like detecting the speed of a car with a radar gun. In the car case, the handheld device shoots a beam at the car. When that is reflected back to the device, the wavelength of the reflection will be pushed toward higher frequency if the car is approaching. The device checks to see how far the reflection from the car has been pushed. From that, the speed of the car is calculated. In the case of a galaxy, the galaxy is already emitting light to us. That light can be analyzed by a spectrometer - a device that gives the amount of energy at each wavelength being received. Scientists look at a chart of the energy at each wavelength to identify the unique pattern that hydrogen always creates. If the galaxy is approaching, that whole hydrogen pattern will be pushed toward blue (instead of having that pattern where it would be if we measured it on earth at zero speed). If it is receding, the pattern will be pushed toward the red end. By measuring how much the pattern was pushed, scientists can calculate how fast the galaxy is moving toward us or away from us.
I suppose, but it kind of starts to feel unethical fairly quickly. Sort of like boxing someone in a wheelchair.
Yes I did, and came up with A) It's a jobs-for-life, empire-building El Dorado for the senior 'scientists' - although I will admit that inventing all kinds of bizarre speculative theories is better than 'working' for a living - wish I could get a piece of the action, and B) It's a flag-waving exercise, where other nations compete for the latest 'discoveries' out there in the universe, and the more they 'discover' the more is their next tranche of 'research' funding. (sorry about all the apostrophes, but they're meaningful?) I'll go further and say that it's one big scam, and you disciples are falling for it hook, line, and sinker.
Ok so you believe that NASA's claim that Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way a few billion years from now is a "scam" for the purpose of jobs-for-life and flag waving. And further, that those who believe it "fell for it" (and ????). I'm sorry but I see zero significant correlation in any of that. It's not quite like peddling the WMD lies in order to get the population to support a war that murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. That lie had a significant and deadly objective. But to each his/her own I guess.
No, I just like this stuff. I suspect that's no different than most who post on this section, though there are probably many who have more formal training.
Does not matter, life on Earth will be extinct by then anyways. At the mot, life on our planet (above the microbial and deep ocean) is really only viable for about another 1 billion years. By that point, the forming of another supercontinent (which always results in massive extinctions) combined with increasing rotational fluctuations and the growing luminosity of our sun will make all surface life extinct. And by 2 billion years this is expected to have boiled off all of the oceans, and will leave the planet a barren lifeless rock. And at 3 billion years from now, the Sun enters it's Red Giant phase. And it will be well along into this phase by the time the first tidal effects from the M31-Milky way collision are felt. And at that point it is unknown where on it's rotation around the Galaxy in the Orion Arm will be effected. It may be absorbed in the new "Milkomeda Galaxy", or it may be ejected to form either a smaller cluster of stars. But there will be no collisions of stars, they are simply all to far apart for this to happen. The only collisions will be in the new Galactic Center, as stars there will likely be absorbed as the 2 super massive black holes (SMBH) absorb each other to make an even more massive black hole in the new galactic center. And by the time this has completed, even if the Sun remains in orbit in the new successor of the Orion Arm, it will not matter. It would already be slipping into it's new life as a White Dwarf. All of the inner planets from Mercury to Earth will have been absorbed into the Sun and become part of it's core, and Mars will occupy roughly the same spot that Mercury does now in relation to the surface.
Galactic collision is inevitable and unimportant in the context of humanity. Our species is unlikely to last the next thousand years let alone a Billion. The concept is interesting to ponder and the implications quite cool but, irrelevant to life on Earth as our planet will be burned up dry rock by then.
Well, if we were gonna make work, to keep scientists employed and more scientists in the pipeline, that is the best make work deal ever! Few professions are more important than those in science. For when you really need them, you really need them. Like in ww2.
He's kinda busy eating his microwave pizza rolls and watching TV while bashing the scientists that made it to get on the computer they made to cut and paste what they wrote while bashing it.
If humanity is still around then, humanity can gradually move the Earth outward, to keep pace with the heating effects. Heck, we could actually do it now, with present technology, just very slowly. However, slow is all you would need, given it's happening over millions of years. "Hang" a mass in space "behind" the Earth relative to the sun. Use many square kilometers of solar sails to catch the solar wind to keep that mass from falling back into the Earth. The gravity of that mass would slowly pull the Earth outward. So, that keeps Earth going until the red giant phase.
By then, "humanity" will likely have been extinct for a few billion years. In the amount of time we are talking about, primitive bacteria evolved into us. Do you really think evolution has ended? If there has not been another "hard reset" on all life on the planet (which has happened several times), odds are that our descendants will look upon us as we do them. But my bet would be that we have maybe another million years or so tops. The planet is already overdue for a massive cataclysm on the scale of the K-T event. So humans, their followers, and their followers after the ones many times after that will be the last on the planet.
