OUR GALAXY IS FLAT, ISN’T IT?

By Prof. Madbush Simeleketek

Here is a map of the Milky Way viewed from “above”.

Figure 1. A Map of the Milky Way

From the Figure 1 above, we see the image of our Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy; the beautiful spiral Galaxy (but not too spiral). See also how small that our Sun compared to the whole Galaxy. Let we see our Sun’s location in more detail that shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2. The Milky Way Galaxy - The Universe within 50000 Light Years

This map shows the full extent of the Milky Way galaxy - a spiral galaxy of at least two hundred billion stars. Our Sun is buried deep within the Orion Arm about 26 000 light years from the centre. Towards the centre of the Galaxy the stars are packed together much closer than they are where we live. Notice also the presence of small globular clusters of stars which lie well outside the plane of the Galaxy, and notice too the presence of a nearby dwarf galaxy - the Sagittarius dwarf - which is slowly being swallowed up by our own galaxy.

But, from the figure 2 above, suddenly I felt “dejavu” and remember to our forgotten “flat world”. See what I mean about this dejavu explained from the two “similar” pictures below.

Figure 3a. Our “Obsolete” Flat World

Figure 3b. Our “Current” Galaxy

Compare the Figure 3a and the Figure 3b above, and tell me what do you think? Here, I could only say, “Hey, the History repeats itself... At the larger scale”





6 comments:

Anonymous said...

flat or not, there is one thing for definate;
the image with the "istockphoto" watermark is stolen. You should be buying the unmarked version in order to be able to use them.

Anonymous said...

i dont believe it is flat but what i do know is that it is millions and billions of light YEARS
and only 7 minutes in light years is the distance from earth to the sun so now imagine 7 x 986.4 billion light years what kind of a distance that would be

Anonymous said...

One light-year is equal to 10 trillion kms. Which then means that if our Galaxy (the Milky Way) is 50 thousand light-years wide it is 5 hundred-thousand trillion kms wide. (500,000,000,000,000,000) At least I think that's how many zeros there are. Im probably wrong though. But holy crap is all i can say to that, 5 hundred-thousand trillion kms!!!

Anonymous said...

I was pondering about the vastness of our galaxy and the actual speed of light.

If it takes 26,000 light years to reach the centre of our universe, then the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) is actually pretty slow considering the amount of space between.

Anonymous said...

Flat Galaxy? Could this be due to so called dark matter compressing (from above and below the visible disk) into the galactic core/black hole. E.g. gives a yo-yo effect whereby the wound up string is the visible galaxy sandwiched between two voids of dark matter which are being sucked into the centre; thus causing a flat rotaing spiral.
Just a thought....

benjamin said...

so the quran is true when it says god will roll up the heavens and earth. it makes it easier if its flat. wow how insignificant are we?