Wednesday 23 July 2008

Far...Out ! Millennium Simulation: "The Largest Model of Our Universe"

This video was the best model enactment of the perceived known universe in 2005 by the Virgo consortium, (an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the UK, Canada, Japan and the USA).... Pink Floyd: provides the aural relief wth their song "Learning to Fly" from their Album; A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

The video demonstrates that the universe is a mere 3.2 Giga Parsecs across ?

The three nearest known stars are gravitationally bound in a system commonly called Alpha Centauri. The two larger stars, said to be Sun-like, are named Alpha Centauri A and B. The nearest to us is the littlest and is called Proxima Centauri. It is classified as a red dwarf and contains just a fraction of the mass of our Sun.The three-star system is 4.36 light-years away, meaning light requires 4.36 years to travel from the stars to Earth, and so we see them as they existed 4.36 years ago. Astronomers announced that Alpha Centauri A is now calculated to be 1,061,000 miles wide (1,708,000 kilometers), or 1.227 times the size of the Sun. The B-star is 748,100 miles across (1,204,000 kilometers), or 0.865 times the Sun's diameter. A parsec (symbol pc) is a unit of length used in astronomy. The length of the parsec is based on the method of trigonometric parallax, one of the oldest methods for measuring the distances to stars.The name parsec stands for "parallax of one second of arc", and one parsec is defined to be the distance from the Earth to a star that has a parallax of 1 arcsecond. The actual length of a parsec is approximately 3.262 light-years.



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