The General Chat Thread (2016-2022)

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SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
? is this in the correct thread? just wondering because it seems to be so out of place here!

I think you may have missed some islands out there... like the isle of man, isle of Wight and potentially Jersey and Guernsey?

Mind you, I'm still trying to get my head around the size of Australia! (source)

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Mind you, that said, the state I live in (New South Wales) is roughly the same size as Texas...
(but the entire population of Texas is the same as Australia!)

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It is entirely possible I answered in the wrong thread. I know creative and I were talking about shelf life somewhere.
 
Cinisajoy said:
It is entirely possible I answered in the wrong thread. I know creative and I were talking about shelf life somewhere.
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I did bring up the topic here since it didn't relate to any other section and was just a passing comment/enquiry. However, I see that it is now deemed worthy of a thread status and comments have been moved, i.e. not your fault.
 
sidevalve said:
Not what I would consider 'occupied' if they want to move on and vote to do so then like scotland and wales other than the never ending political gravy train there is nothing to stop them.
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Hah! I knew someone would bite.

Although, we shouldn't talk politics. Tiocfaidh ar la.
 
Angela Merkel arrives at Passport Control in Athens airport.
"Nationality?" asks the immigration officer.
"German," she replies.
"Occupation?
"No, just here for a few days."
 
creative said:
I did bring up the topic here since it didn't relate to any other section and was just a passing comment/enquiry. However, I see that it is now deemed worthy of a thread status and comments have been moved, i.e. not your fault.
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Nice to know I'm not losing my mind.
 
creative said:
Yeah I get it already....how many chopsticks could it contain I wonder!!!
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95,165,223,000,000,000,000,000, based on traditional Chinese chopsticks(They dispose of 45,000,000,000 a year) and a figure of 13679.8076 per square metre. Half that for pairs.

The above figure assumes that the chopsticks have been placed for maximum packing. They are tapered after all.
 
classic33 said:
95,165,223,000,000,000,000,000, based on traditional Chinese chopsticks(They dispose of 45,000,000,000 a year) and a figure of 13679.8076 per square metre. Half that for pairs.

The above figure assumes that the chopsticks have been placed for maximum packing. They are tapered after all.
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You had me at 95....
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I see you haven't wasted your life......
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And now, for serious money.....how many stars are there in the galaxy?
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creative said:
You had me at 95....
dontlaugh.gif
I see you haven't wasted your life......
default_wacko.png


And now, for serious money.....how many stars are there in the galaxy?
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Well estimates say there are about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in the Milky Way, about equal to the number of grains of sand on ALL of the beaches on planet Earth!!!

If we make a couple of basic assumptions:

  1. Galaxies are evenly distributed throughout the Universe (locally clumped in galaxy clusters though). The Hubble deep sky image (which you mentioned), taken in a region with no known foreground stars, has indeed shown to us that there are as many galaxies at the largest distances as there are close to us.
  2. Typical galaxies have about the same numbers of stars, on average. Actual numbers in individual galaxies can vary widely. We talk about an average here. Even, if galaxies looked different in the past (another result from the Hubble image), they formed into a similar set of galaxies, with a similar number of stars as the ones we see close to us.
Now, working with those assumptions:

  1. Let's assume the large Virgo cluster of galaxies is typical. It contains about 2000 galaxies. Let's say a typical cluster has 1000. Now Virgo is about 100 million light years away from us (another famous Hubble result). Let's assume that galaxy clusters are typically at a distance from the nearest neighbors of 100 million light years and make the assumption that they are distributed at the centers of 100 million light year sized cubes tightly packed (to simplify our calculation). When we fit these cubes into the volume of the observable Universe, this gives us 10 billion (or 1010) galaxies.
  2. Our Milky Way galaxy and our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, both have about 100 billion stars. There are some larger galaxies, but also many smaller ones. Let's assume this is a typical size.
Multiplying 1. by 2. makes 1000 billion billion stars. This is the number of sand grains that you need to pile up. A typical sand grain has a size, let's say, of 0.5 mm. Again let's assume these are little cubes (for the sake of simplicity). The collection of as many sand grains as there are stars in the sky would sum up to a sphere with a radius of about 3 km, i.e. the typical size of a comet nucleus, but not as large as a substantial fraction of our moon.
 
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