M-31
.The Andromeda Galaxy
We Are From Another Galaxy...
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M-31
.The Andromeda Galaxy |
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We Are From Another Galaxy... |
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How many times have we heard that statement from “aliens” in television shows? How many people realize the absurdity of the words? Near as I can determine, this declaration became a standard of science fiction around 1960, give or take a few years. These were the “golden years” of drive-in theatres, and the low budget sci-fi genre from Hollywood. This was when the B-grade films about alien invasions, monster spiders, insects, and radioactive mutants abounded. When the “Aliens” landed, they seemingly ALWAYS announced that they were from Another Galaxy. From this cliché, came more. Suddenly we had intergalactic travel, intergalactic war, intergalactic this, and intergalactic that. Today, most people don’t know what it means, or how ridiculous it is. How did this come about? Slowly over time, ignorant Hollywood writers instilled, in the movie going public, the idea that galaxy must be the term for a collection of planets revolving about a star other than our Sun. Nothing could be further from reality. The proper term for any sun and its planets is “star system”, or “solar system”. It would be far more appropriate for these erstwhile aliens to land and announce that “We are from another star”, or to wage inter-STELLAR war, or carry out inter-STELLAR travel, etc. A GALAXY is an island universe containing many, many billions of stars. Our Milky Way is a galaxy. It’s the galaxy which contains our Sun, and one hundred billion others. It may be difficult to tell on a clear night when looking up. But it’s also hard to tell what a forest looks like when you are in the middle of it. Galaxies range in many sizes, shapes, and distances from us. The nearest is the Large Magellanic Cloud, at some 150,000 light years, just around the corner astronomically speaking. The Small Magellanic Cloud is only a bit further away. Both of these dwarf galaxies are only seen in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. The next closest is M-31 (Messier designation), commonly known as The Andromeda Galaxy, is more than two million light years away. A Light Year is the distance that light will travel through space, at 186,000 MILES PER SECOND, in ONE YEAR! This is a mind-boggling distance, and a tough concept for the average Joe on the street. At this speed, and we cannot go this fast, it takes TWO MILLION YEARS for light to reach us from The Andromeda Galaxy! Hardly a walk in the park, even for “Aliens”. There are stars in our immediate astronomical neighborhood, which may harbor planets capable of supporting life, and are less than twenty years away at the speed of light. So when ever I am watching one of those science fiction shows where the aliens claim to be from “Another Galaxy”, I usually turn to my wife and say something like, “Darn it honey, WHY don’t TV writers do their HOMEWORK? They call it SCIENCE fiction, so where’s the science?” ***
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