Comments | gojiraeight: cool macro scale gif

gojiraeight

cool macro scale gif

Oct 01, 2008 17:35

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gojiraeight October 2 2008, 00:31:43 UTC

and just think that in our galaxy their are anywhere from 200 to possibly 400+billion stars. After that our galaxy is one of 35 different galaxies in The Local Group. After that you have galaxy clusters and superclusters. Superclusters having as many as several thousand galaxies in them. Their are believed to be about 10 million superclusters in the Universe equaling over 100 billion galaxies total!!

timeprojectile October 2 2008, 05:25:44 UTC

Not to mention how many "past" universes and/or alternate universes there may have been...we still don't know where the Big Bang came from, and currently popular hypotheses suggest cyclical or multiple universes where time begins and ends and starts over again or where there are many bubbles forming each with their own space and time.

timeprojectile October 2 2008, 05:24:15 UTC

Damn. There are some monstrous stars out there. But the mass range of stars is pretty small - only about a factor of 1000 between the "lightest" and "heaviest." Compared to a factor of maybe a million for the lightest vs. heaviest galaxies. And the "lightest" stars are about the size of Jupiter, but at least 80 times "heavier." Size differences are mostly a matter of what the star's burning and how fast it's burning it, and for "main sequence" stars like the Sun and Sirius, this depends on mass. For the rest, it's a combo of mass and evolutionary stage. Stars in their death throes can swell up to ridiculous sizes as they rapidly fuse a wide range of fuels.

Oops. I forgot to mention white dwarfs and neutron "stars," the latter being about the diameter of a city, but I don't generally think of them as stars, 'cause they lack the primary characteristic of stars: nuclear fusion. They're about as much "stars" as a supernova remnant or a black hole is.