alt Hacker NewsFun fact. The estimated number of stars in the Milky Way (~2e11-4e11) is within an order of magnitude of the estimated number of individual particles of smoke in a cigarette (~1e12).
Replies
Cthulhu_ • 10/01/2024
A compelling argument for the galaxy is someone's weed dream theory.
konstantinua00 • 10/01/2024
so if every star smokes a cigarette, there will be roughly 1 mol (6.02e23) of said particles?
I'll post my fun fact as a reply to yours, also relating to the Milky Way and in some ways very much tied to this article.
We don't see something like 99% of the light from stars at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, because the Great Rift is in the way [0]. This fact is astonishing to me and I can't believe more people don't talk about it.
Our night sky would be substantially brighter and more spectacular if not for that rift. But the infrared light gets through and that light can be seen by the ESO telescope. Per the article:
>This has given us an accurate 3D view of the inner regions of the Milky Way, which were previously hidden by dust.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rift_(astronomy)