Ok, I admit I was drawn in by the headline of this New Scientist article…
“Bar at Milky Way’s heart revealed”
…which is worth a read even if it is not quite about what it suggests.
-cvj
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August 17th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
I read it, so…
August 17th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Silly Theoretical-Physicist-Geek thought between computations:
I can’t help but wonder if galaxies with bars must annihilate with galaxies without bars…. That would be quite a gamma-ray burster….
(I know, it’s bad… sorry.)
-cvj
August 17th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
I am so glad our galaxy has a creamy center.
August 17th, 2005 at 8:20 pm
Silly food-scientist-geek (that I am) thought:
I can’t help but enjoy that clever food and space tie-in Clifford made with the titles from the Douglas Adams book and the article.
(Sorry, Milky Way and bars makes me think of chocolate candies first.) : )
August 17th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
Hi, Athena and Gordon, It’s better than that….in the article, there is a section entitled “bar food”, where they talk about the speculations that the bar geometry could be involved in feeding matter into the black hole at the centre of the galaxy…. There are so many funny directions in which to go with this… and we have not even started on the alcohol-based ones yet…
-cvj
August 18th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
It’s an energy bar of course, some 27,000 light years of chocolare, crunchy peanuts and three layers of macroscopic strings. These macroscopic strings may describe chord construction for Five-String & Plectrum Banjo better than SM currently does
August 18th, 2005 at 3:36 pm
I hope that supermassive black hole doesn’t get kicked out of the bar anytime soon! Cause when it does, that’s when the REAL trouble’s gonna start…
August 18th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
That’s it. The big black hole at the center was formed by a little black hole that ate up vast quantities of chocolate and peanuts. Hmmmm… now maybe someone can write a children’s Astronomy story book on the theme.
It ate and ate and ate until it became so big that it began to gobble up everything around it …