[ExI] LIGO is back online

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu Dec 1 17:37:42 UTC 2016



-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Chris Hibbert
Subject: Re: [ExI] LIGO is back online

>
>>... Excellent, fasten your seatbelts cosmology fans, this is going to be
biiiiig fun, a fun time to be alive. ... spike


>...A friend told me last night he went to a talk at Stanford on LIGO, and
the unit of reference was Giga-cubic parsecs/year. Now that's a unit to take
your breath away!

Chris
  --


Chris cosmology is full of mind-blowing stuff, but consider for a giga cubic
parsec.  If we want to say the moon (or the sun) appears about a half a
degree across, that's close enough to about 1800 seconds of arc and the area
comes out to about 3 million square arc seconds (indulge me on the single
digit of precision BOTECs por favor.)  If you imagine looking through the
moon about 300 million light years out there, and imagine a cube of space
being blocked out by the moon, that block of space is about a billion cubic
parsecs.  Better way to say it: if you had a giga-parsec^3 sphere out there
about 300 million light years, it could be total eclipsed by the moon.
Cool!

Since I did these numbers in my head, please check me on order of magnitude
at least, or sharpen it to a single digit of precision please, astronomy
hipsters.

If I did those numbers right, there are skerjillions of cubic megaparsecs
everywhere we gaze into the sky.  Moral of the story: space is big.  Space
is waaay big.

spike






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