Laniakea

If you read the news, and I’m sure you do, you doubtless have read about Laniakea. But in case you missed that particular news item, let me briefly recap. Laniakea is a Hawaiian word that is roughly translated as “spacious heaven,” and it is the new name for the local supercluster.

Now you may ask, what is the local supercluster? Or for that matter, what is a supercluster, local or otherwise?

My explanation starts with the sun. Our sun is a member of the Milky Way Galaxy, along with about 100 to 400 billion other suns. (We call them stars, of course, and our sun is a star.) The sun travels through space, but it doesn’t travel alone. We have all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy traveling with us.

Just as stars form groups called galaxies, galaxies form groups, too. Our Milky Way is a member of a group of galaxies we call the Local Group, which includes all the galaxies within 5 million light years of the Milky Way. In addition to the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies (yes, there are small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way), the Local Group includes the Andromeda Galaxy and its satellite galaxies, the Triangulum Galaxy, and dozens of other galaxies. The Local Group contains more than 54 galaxies. The exact number of galaxies is not certain, as from time to time a new one is found.

The Local Group is part of a larger collection of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster, which contains at least 1300 galaxies and possibly as many as 2000 galaxies. As large as it is, the Virgo Cluster is only one galaxy cluster in a much larger group called the Virgo Supercluster. The Virgo Supercluster is, or was, our local supercluster and was thought to be 110 million light years in diameter.

Now a team of astronomers have published a new way of defining galaxies and they tell us that the Milky Way Galaxy is a part of a new supercluster called the Laniakea Supercluster. They tell us that Laniakea is about 520 million light years in diameter. (Furthermore, Laniakea seems to be gravitationally bound to an even larger assembly of galaxies called the Shapley Concentration, but that’s another story.)

These are awfully big distances and therefore difficult to grasp. To put all this vast scale into a more understandable perspective, I want to shrink the Milky Way Galaxy down to the size of our sun. To do the calculations I am going to use scientific notation. Scientific notation is a way of expressing numbers by using powers of 10. For instance, 100 is written 1.0e+2, 1000 is written 1.0e+3, 5,000,000 is written 5.0e+6. Fractions have a negative exponent: 0.01 is written 1.0e-2, 0.001 is written 1.0e-3, 0.000005 is written 5.0e-6. And so on.

The Milky Way’s diameter is estimated to be 100,000 to 120,000 LY (light years). Let us choose to use the average which is 110,000 LY or 1.1e+5 LY. Using the metric system, the Milky Way’s diameter in meters is 1.1e+5 LY x 9.46e+15 meters/LY = 1.04e+21 meters. (If we weren’t using scientific notation we would have to write down the distance using this number: 1,040,000,000,000,000,000,000 and you can see how awkward that becomes.)

Our sun has a diameter of 1,391,684 kilometers (1.392e+9 meters). Therefore the ratio of the sun's diameter to the Milky Way's diameter is (1.392e+9)/(1.04e+21) = 1.338e-12. Just by looking at that number we know that the sun’s diameter is about a millionth of a millionth (a trillionth) of the diameter of its parent galaxy. If Laniakea were shrunk so that the Milky Way Galaxy was the size of our sun, the sun would be shrunk by the same factor, so we can calculate its new diameter:

Sun’s new diameter = 1.392e+9 meters x 1.338e-12 = 1.86e-3 meters = 1.86 millimeters

A US dime is 1.35 millimeters thick. If the Milky Way Galaxy was the size of our sun, our sun would then have a diameter slightly more than the thickness of a dime. We can perform a similar calculation on our home planet, which has an average diameter of 12,742 km – slightly more at the equator, slightly less at the poles.

Earth’s new diameter =  1.2742e+7 x 1.338e-12 = 1.705e-5 meters = 17 microns

The diameter of a strand of human hair can range from from 17 to 181 microns. So Earth’s new diameter would be the same as the finest (meaning thinnest) human hair.

I’ve already stated that the Laniakea Supercluster has a diameter of about 520 million light years. If it were shrunk so that our Milky Way Galaxy was the size of our sun, how big would Laniakea then be? First, let’s convert its length from light years to meters.

Laniakea’s diameter = 5.2e+8 LY x 9.46e+15 meters/LY = 4.9192e+24 meters

Laniakea’s new diameter =4.9192e+24 x 1.338e-12 = 6.5818896e+12 meters

How big is this? How can we visualize it? The planet Saturn is 9.537 times as far from the sun as is planet Earth, which amounts to 1.427e+12 meters. The diameter of its orbit around the sun would be twice that, or 2.854e+12 meters. The diameter of the newly shrunken Laniakea Supercluster would be more than twice the current (non-shrunken) diameter of Saturn’s orbit around the sun.

So here’s the summation:

If we shrink space so that Laniakea has a diameter twice as large as Saturn’s orbit about the sun, then our Milky Way galaxy will have the diameter of the sun, the sun’s diameter will be about the thickness of a dime, and the Earth’s diameter will equal the thinnest human hair. And if you are a human who is 6 feet (1.83 meters) tall, how tall would you be in our shrunken supercluster? You’d be 2.45e-12 meters tall. What else is that small? Not much. In fact, it would take a thousand of you, lined up head to toe, to equal the length of the smallest virus humans have studied. Our local supercluster is a pretty big thing, compared to us humans, compared to our home planet, compared to our home star, and even compared to our home galaxy. And the part of the Universe we can observe holds at least a million superclusters.

Naked Photos

I read today that a lot of celebrity nude photos have been stolen from Apple’s iCloud service and then uploaded to a website, somewhere. These include photos of Rihanna, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Hope Solo. Jackpot!

No, no, no! What I meant to say was, “For shame!” To steal someone’s private, naked photos and make them public; how low can you go? I have just two things to say about this situation: one, it’s a disgrace, and two, exactly where can these photos be found?

It makes me wonder, just how safe are my own naked photos? Should I worry about shadowy people on the Internet downloading naked photos of moi?  Even now, sweaty people I don’t even know might be gleefully ogling my naked body.

Just kidding! There are no naked pictures of VirtualWayne on the Internet or anywhere else. If there were, and if people downloaded them and saw them, they would immediately want to claw their eyeballs out in an attempt to un-see them. But it would be in vain. There are some images you just can’t get out of your head. Like that bad automobile accident I saw on the way to the beach, or that cattle car derailment my parents dragged me to when I was six just so they could take pictures, a naked VirtualWayne photograph is one of those things that – well, let’s just say it ain’t pretty and leave it there.

Now please excuse me; I have to go and see how many people have downloaded my latest sex tape. You know – the one I made with what’s-her-name – the actress who was in that movie that was so popular. What was its name? Oh yeah, “Naked Porn.”

I’m kidding! I have no sex tapes. But I do predict this blog post will get a lot of views. After all, it uses the word “naked” eleven times including in the title, plus the words “sex tape” and “porn.” That’s got to get it ranked pretty high by all the search engines. Think of the number of people on the Internet searching for naked photos right now, and think how many of them are going to end up here at my blog! And now think of the disappointment! It’s going to be massive. Serves ‘em right for looking for naked photos to begin with. To all of them I say, “Made you look!”

August Winding Down

I lay on top of the sheets in my underwear. It was 3 PM on this summer day near the end of August. The day was hot and so the window beside my bed was open. In my house there is only me, and so I get to decide when to turn on the a/c, and therefore often – okay, always – the a/c is not turned on until the house is much too hot. But I like having the windows open. I like feeling the breeze coming through, I like smelling fresh air, I like hearing the sounds outside; I feel connected to the world. When I turn on the a/c, and I close the windows, then I feel like I’m shut away inside a box. With the windows closed and the a/c on, I’m more comfortable physically but less comfortable mentally. So I keep the a/c off and the windows open for as long as I can stand the heat.

Through the open window I hear a strange noise in the distance, kind of a loud crack. It was not the sound of an automobile colliding with another automobile. I once lived in a 3rd floor apartment beside a bad intersection where there were a lot of accidents. While I lived there I heard cars hitting cars, cars hitting pickup trucks, cars hitting motorcycles. This noise that came through my bedroom window was something else, but it had that flavor of something smacking something. It was not a good sound.

Then I heard another sound. This new sound was so weak that it could have been my imagination. The sound was so weakened by distance that when it reached me it must have been just a few molecules of air jiggling my eardrum. But it sounded like a distant human voice saying, “call 911.” I imagined the rest of the sentence: “Do you want me to call 911?”

I rolled to a seated position on the edge of the bed and put my glasses on. I trudged to the front room and looked out. Traffic had stopped on Westover Avenue and automobile passengers were leaning out their windows and looking down the street ahead of them. I trudged back to my bedroom and pulled on shorts and a tee-shirt. I put on socks and shoes. Time to investigate.

By the time I left my house there was already a cop at the corner directing traffic away from the accident. I walked to the corner and looked up Westover; another police car was at the next intersection, its blue emergency beacons flashing away. I walked down the street to the accident. Police were talking to a young black woman. She had been driving a red scooter. It appeared she drove through a stop sign and into the side of a car. The front of her scooter was smashed, but she looked perfectly okay.

I continued on my way until I circumnavigated the block. On the way I stopped to talk to a woman sitting on her front porch. Of course I knew both her and her husband who, she said, was inside lying on the bed. After ten minutes I felt like I was perspiring sufficiently to embarrass myself with growing wet spots on my clothes, so I continued on to my house. Once inside my house I got out of my sweat-soaked clothes as quickly as I could and hung them up to dry. I wasted no time turning on the a/c. Screw the smell of fresh air. It was time to burn some kilowatts.

ISS

Warm night air. Bare feet on concrete sidewalk. I scan the western sky expectantly. At first, nothing. Then I see the International Space Station sailing slowly out of the west, a point of light rising above the willow oak across the street – a bright star, not the brightest but brighter than most – moving slowly and steadily across the sky toward the northeast. Moving, but not going lower, not going toward the horizon, but rather going into the northeast sky, fading, dimming. I glance away as a mini-van turns the corner and passes. One headlight is out. It’s Elisabeth. (Last night she moved from her rented house into a nearby apartment. Why has she returned to her former abode?) Look back at the northeastern sky; the moving star has vanished.

This is the third time I’ve seen the space station. I recall the first time I saw it: a shuttle was chasing it across the sky then, ferrying passengers to, or from, the station. On that night there were two bright, moving points of light that instantly winked out as shuttle and station flew into Earth’s shadow.

There’s nothing remarkable about seeing the space station fly overhead. And yet it is something that has never occurred in the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history. A species on Earth has learned how to climb above the atmosphere and circle Earth in the vacuum of space every 90 minutes.

Baby steps. How long from Columbus’s voyage to the beginning of a new country? To be around in a hundred or so years: that should be an interesting time.

Spaghetti

I fixed shrimp-basil spaghetti for dinner last night. I totally winged the recipe but it turned out pretty darn good if I say so myself. If you want to try it, I put the recipe (such that it is) on Google here. The recipe requires a certain amount of “winging” on the part of anyone who follows it. But it’s one of those recipes that is almost impossible to mess up.

Today I decided to fix spaghetti with meat sauce, and so I put a pound of ground beef into my slow cooker. I have one of those 6 inch by 10 inch rectangular-shaped cookers. I’ve had it for years and I no longer have the user guide. It has 5 heat settings, none of which are “Off”. I assume the settings are Low, Medium, High, Super-High, and Burn-Baby-Burn.

My intent was to brown the meat then add store-bought pasta sauce and simmer it for a while. Using a spatula, I cut the lump of ground beef into small pieces and spread them out over the bottom of the cooker. It takes the cooker a while to get going, as one might surmise from it’s name: slow cooker. So I walked to the computer and sat down and almost immediately got distracted, and I kind of forgot about the ground beef in the slow cooker. After a while – a good while – I remembered the slow-cooking meat, and went to the kitchen and looked into the cooker. I saw that I now had a 6 inch by 10 inch hamburger patty. I spent the next 5 or 10 minutes cutting it up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until I had converted the large patty into what could pass for browned ground beef if you didn’t examine it too closely. (I admit I did consider dividing the large patty into small square patties and pretend I was eating at Wendy’s, but in the end the original plan prevailed.)

I poured pasta sauce into the cooker and stirred the sauce and meat to blend them, and put the lid on the cooker. When it gets to boiling I’ll turn the heat down to medium and let it simmer for an hour. I don’t really know why I’m letting it simmer for an hour. Like many things in life, it just seems like the right thing to do.

Late Night Shenanigans

I was in bed trying to sleep when I heard a police siren. It sounded close. I looked out the window and saw a car in my neighbor’s back yard and a police car stopped in the alley behind my house. The siren was blaring, because that’s what sirens do: they blare. I glimpsed a man dash away from the car with an officer in foot pursuit. In a minute the officer came back, inspected the just-abandoned car, and called a tow truck. The tow truck driver was a young woman wearing short-shorts. She had much nicer legs than your average tow truck driver. She drove the car onto the rollback tow truck and chained it down, and off it went to wherever bad cars go. I wondered briefly what the car chase was about. After all, fleeing a police car seems the tiniest bit of over-reaction to getting a speeding ticket, so I assumed the driver’s misconduct was something more serious. Perhaps he had just robbed a convenience store, stolen a car, and fled with the loot. Whatever. I returned to bed. Another exciting day at the hacienda had come to a close.

Luck

I had a long and winding dream last night, as I often do. I won’t try to recount it all, but there was one small part that I will write about. I dreamed my brother went to North Carolina to buy a car. In the dream, he said he went to a town called Luck. So of course I Googled it and as it happens, there really is a town called Luck in Madison County, North Carolina. Well, it’s less a town than what one might call a fork in the road, but it’s on Google Maps, and it has an entry in Wikipedia, and I reckon those two facts alone make it semi-officially a town.

Luck is on the eastern side of North Carolina highway 209, about 20 miles northwest of Asheville. On the western side of 209 is part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

On a satellite photo, Luck appears to consist of two houses and a derelict gas station. (Click the image to view on Panoramio.) But I have no doubt that up and down state highway 209 and county road 1163 (the fork in the road), one would find a scattering of homes whose occupants count themselves a part of the Luck community.

Oh … about the car that my brother bought in Luck. It looked just like an Amphicar, the car from the ‘60s that you could drive on land and water. (Check out this page.) President Lyndon Johnson had an Amphicar, and he liked to frighten guests by driving them down a hill on his property and straight into a lake, all the while shouting that his brakes had failed. Lyndon could be quite the joker.

But my brother’s car only looked like an Amphicar. In the dream it was a brand called Phaedra which, as far as I know, is a brand that does not exist outside of my head. The Phaedra had an insignia on its front that looked like a golden, backward pilcrow. In case you’ve forgotten, a pilcrow (¶) is a typographical paragraph mark. In the Middle Ages, before the paragraph was invented, a pilcrow was used to indicate a change in the writer’s train of thought.

Anyway, that was one little piece of my dream. You wouldn’t like most of my dreams. They’re quite tedious. Much like this blog post.

Battery Goes Bang

Seems like it’s always something. A couple of days ago it rained especially hard, so I went upstairs and peeked under the eave to see if the roof was leaking. You see, I had a new roof installed three years ago, and it leaked. The roofer who installed it refused to come back and fix the leak. So I paid another roofer to fix the leak, and I thought it was fixed. But when I looked under the eave I saw it was leaking again in the very same place it had leaked before. Oy.

Just last month my Jeep developed a problem. It would start but it wouldn’t keep running. I guessed (correctly) that the problem was the Idle Air Controller (IAC). I borrowed a set of hex keys (Allen wrenches – the brand name Allen was stamped into them) from my friend Butch and removed the IAC. I cleaned it and re-installed it, but that didn’t help. So I trekked around to the AutoZone store for a new IAC. I trekked back home, installed it, and it fixed the problem. That was three weeks ago.

This morning I went to my garage, got into my Jeep, put the key into the ignition, and turned the key to start the engine. BANG!!! Blue smoke poured from under the hood. I got out, raised the hood, and saw the problem immediately. The battery had exploded. You don’t have to be a mechanic to know a battery shouldn’t look like this. (I disconnected the battery cables before I took the picture – the explosion didn’t blow them off, in case you were wondering.)

What a mess. Battery acid was all over the front of the engine and dripping onto the cement floor of the garage. I used a box of baking soda – all I had – dissolved into a gallon of water to neutralize the acid. This time I asked Butch to drive me to AutoZone for a new battery. I was not about to lug an automobile battery back to my house. I got the battery, installed it, and the Jeep started right up. I have transportation once more. It’s a good feeling.

Blooming Lagerstroemia

Today is Sunday. I woke up late: 7:30 AM. The sun was already up too high but I went for a walk anyway. On every street bloomed Lagerstroemia (named after the Swedish merchant Magnus von Lagerström), commonly known as crape myrtle or crepe myrtle. There are around 50 varieties of crape myrtle. There is the bright red Dynamite Crape Myrtle, the deep pink Pink Velour Crape and the purple Twilight Crape Myrtle (which has bark that changes color). Some have white blossoms. So it can be said that when you’ve seen one crape myrtle, you definitely have not seen them all.

The neighborhood would be a poorer place without them.

Arthur

Arthur grazed the Heights this morning, as you can see from the WunderMap below. See the little red “pin” just left of the yellow-green blob? That’s me. But the rain stayed away, and the only wind was gentle puffs of air that came through the open window beside my bed.

I must have awakened around 5 or 5:30. I didn’t look at the clock, but it was pre-dawn, and the daylight peeking through the Venetian blinds was gray. The air coming through the open window beside my bed was cool in a refreshing way. I don’t usually run the a/c during the night, and sometimes the house warms up a bit because the exterior walls are still warm from the day’s sunshine, and so the cool air coming through the window felt good. I lay on top of the sheets. The gray dawn lingered for a long time, it seemed, and the cool breezes though the window lingered, and it was very pleasant, and I didn’t want to get up. But I finally did – get up, that is – around 7:30.

By noon the air is 79° and the day is sunny. It’s the fourth of July, of course. I was studying the Declaration of Independence and noticed a bit of punctuation that everyone has apparently overlooked. It’s a period. In England, I believe it’s called a full stop. What I found was that this bit of punctuation – this period, lost until now – totally changes the meaning of the document. When he wrote the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson was trying to express his admiration for England’s King George III and how nice it was to be a British subject. You see, Jefferson was quite the Loyalist. But unfortunately, due to that lost bit of punctuation, the colonists thought he was calling for a War of Revolution. Before Jefferson knew what was happening, events had unfolded way out of control and, well, the rest is history. America became an independent nation because of that lost period. (You may not believe me but remember, you’re reading it on the Internet so it has to be true. I couldn’t write it if it wasn’t so.)

Happy Fourth of July!