geekosystem

On Thursday, NASA scientists announced that after scouring reams of data from the Hubble Space Telescope they can say with certainty that our Milky Way is destined to eventually collide with our neighbor the Andromeda galaxy. Of course, it won't happen for about 4 billion years, but it can't hurt to be prepared.

This all too brief time lapse video from the International Space Station shows our home planet with storms sparking over Africa. It's a breathtaking, if humbling, view, made all the more so by the enormous Milky Way galaxy rising behind Earth. Just a little reminder of how staggeringly huge and beautiful the universe is and how small we are.

It's unlikely that aliens are sitting around fiddling with rabbit ears in attempt to listen to our nonsense, but nevertheless, humans have been sending messages into space for decades. The first AM broadcast was on Christmas Eve, 1906, and Hitler's broadcasting of the 1936 Olympics is regarded as the first signal powerful enough to be carried into space. When compared to the vast size of the Milky Way, our presence here on Earth seems insignificant. Even our space-bound messages -- which are traveling at the speed of light -- are dwarfed by the galaxy's immensity. The image on the left illustrates our "bubble" of existence, which spans 200 light years in all directions -- but is just a small blip on the cosmic radar.

Perhaps we spoke too soon about the Milky Way galaxy's thinness: NASA scientists have discovered two enormous "gamma-ray-emitting bubbles" which appear to emanate from the center of the galaxy, each extending 25,000 light years "north and south of the galactic center." The Milky Way has a diameter of about 100,000 light years in total, and the structure covers more than half of the visible sky.