Awesome Looking Galaxy

[2 F 4 B P]

Man has been around millions of years too. If you think dinosaurs last roamed the Earth millions of years ago.

From the Flintstones, we know man has been around since the dinosaurs since we tamed them and used them to mine rocks.

Also used them for showers, sinks, toilets, lawn mowers, hedge clippers... did I mention toilets?

 

[DarkosCY]

it isn't a theory, its a guess. i'd love to see the evidence they have regarding this or any other galaxy that makes it a solid theory as to what they really believe it to be. you yourself are giving them excuses, saying they have mounds of data, you don't even know what data they have or don't have. you just accept what the scientists tell you. very dangerous thing to do my friend.

umm, actually, any "guess" backed by even the smallest shred of evidence is called a scientific theory, which just awaits validation or rejection. While by no means a fact, the theory of planetary evolution through nebulae and cosmic dust is pretty solid, even if for the very simple reason that no-one has managed to come up with a better theory, or more appropriately, model!
as for the mounds of data, I'd say that IR, UV, gamma and visible EM spectra from telescopes such as the Hubble telescope can easily be classified as data. And as with everything else in the scientific world, if you can't disprove a theory/guess/model, it stands!

well in reality NOBODY ever has seen a star form. it has never been observed in the history of mankind. we see them blow up but never have they been formed. In fact scientists cannot even come up with a good theory as to how stars can form.
Also their guesstimation that it is 17 million light years away (could be, but they can't measure that) has nothing to do with time. A light year is a measure of distance, not time. 17 million light years away does not mean 17 million years ago.

umm, yeah, brief newsflash here, it's called the principle of conservation of matter! i.e. matter cannot be made from nothing or destroyed! a very good example of why stars explode/implode and re-form are the presence of heavy metals such as uranium in the Earth's crust. To form such heavy elements, you need colossal atomic fusion furnaces in even more gigantic stars (since fusion becomes very very hard to sustain when using something as light as iron in smaller stars)
as i said before, nebulae and cosmic dust seems like a pretty good theory to me!
and yeah, tiddy was spot on with his explanation of light years, so i won't go into that=p
anyway, this is an unnecessary debate around a very beautiful picture, let's just let this go and enjoy the beauty, charm and mystery the Universe has to offer

 

[50centricher]

Space is beautiful

really it is a lot of stuff out in space we can learn from... it is amazing and i want to explore it

I really love the way it looks and what it has to offer us.

I hope i get the chance to go into space and enjoy what it haves for me to look at.

 

[ScrappyDoo]

Quoth Hitchhiker's:

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

 

[Mustachio]

Sooo you're saying my meter stick won't work?

Well itll work... you will just need 160,828,983,000,000,000,000,000 of them.

Thanks google for converting light years to meters!

And yes, as someone else had said, 17,000,000 light years, means the distance that light can travel in 17,000,000 years. So as was also said, what we are seeing from that distance has been traveling for 17,000,000 years to get here.

Now what I fin even crazier is that the farthest reach of the galaxy (that can be observed from here or apparently any one place in the universe) is 13 billion light years. YIKES. Not to mention they dont even have any idea just how much bigger it could actually be that we cannot observe.

And if you are wondering why we can only observe about 13 billion light years is because the universe (by best estimates) is 13 billion years old, which ties back in to the distance and the amount of time.

I watched a show on nat geo recently and the thing i found the craziest is that space is actually expanding faster than the speed of light.... weird.

By the way, im not an astronomer so if anyone wants to correct my numbers, by all means.

SPACE IS CRAZY!!!

 

[JunK]

well you guys are right that it is pretty off topic to debate about this over such a picture. however i highly HIGHLY recommend that you guys step outside of the little bubble school and what this world calls "science", has placed around your world view and thought process because when i read what you're saying, its comical.
lets see here....no they cannot measure millions of light years, it is an impossibility. though maybe a few thousand. look at the way they say its done (triangulation and redshift). there are also articles basically admitting they can only calculate a few thousand, tho it would take a couple days to find those sources again.
Also to say that picture is 17 million years ago because its 17 million light years away you're assuming much. 1, that it is 17 million light years away. 2, that the speed of light is a constant...which it is not. and thats been proven in the laboratory with actual scientific tests. 3, that the galaxy and the earth have stayed in the same place precisely, in order not to change the distance relative to the time. 4, light reacts the same way in space and is not affected by things such as black holes or whatever. etc

also you say it takes millions of years for stars to form. this is interesting you say this. reason? because there are a lot of stars. the amount of stars we know about is estimated to be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. and if you assume the universe is 20 billion years old. that means that for 20 billion years you'd need approximately 1,625 stars to form every single second, in order to have the amount of stars we do today.
which is funny, because stars on average blow up every 30 years. so in order to keep the balance we'd need a star to form at least every 30 years, just to keep the same amount. well...again mankind has never witnessed a star forming.

and darkos its great that you bring up the principle of conservation of matter, basically the first law of thermodynamics stating that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. so i ask then, where did it call come from to begin with? because i know probably the only belief in this discussion is the theory of evolution, which would say the big bang, which this law stated by yourself has a problem with. oh and if you're familiar with the laws of the universe, to this picture i challenge you to compare it (and the info said about it...how the gas/stars are spinning in opposite directions) to the conservation law of angular momentum.
and you say that nebula and cosimic dust seems like a pretty good theory to you. what i assume you're talking about is the formation of stars, which is thought to be these gasses enclosing in on one another and squeezing tightly until, poof, a star.
well if this is what you're talking about, first of all its never been observed, second of all i'll bring up a grade school science lesson called Boyles gas law.


Let me just sum up by saying its very dangerous to accept and believe everything people tell you. You should really research things out yourself. Try your best not to be bias during your search, or else you'll only find what you want to find. Just set aside your preconceived notions and really research and compare evidence for whatever, then based on the evidence present you will come to a conclusion. Just like a police detective!

 

[RESPAWN]

Guys, this is getting kind of silly. We're all entitled to our opinions and I don't think anybody is going to convince anybody of anything here. I know I for one didn't come here to debate the existence of science. I came to say "Oooh. Shiney."