Word: reid
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...turns out that our solar system is moving nearly 100,000 m.p.h. faster than previously thought - revolving around the center of the Milky Way at 568,000 m.p.h., announced Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on Monday at the American Astronomical Society's conference in Long Beach, Calif. Since velocity is related to mass, the 15% increase in solar-system speed translates into a near doubling of mass of the Milky Way, according to Reid's group - and all of that newfound bulk is composed of dark matter...
Original estimates of the solar system's speed were based on what Reid calls "one-dimensional velocity" obtained solely from Doppler shifts. "Now," he says, "we have three-dimensional velocity and more exact measurements" - a huge advancement in the field. The findings debunk the notion that the Milky Way is a little-sister galaxy to her neighbor Andromeda. "They're more like fraternal twins," Reid says. And the fact that they are of equal size increases the likelihood that the two will someday collide. (See the Top 50 space moments since Sputnik...
...flurry of recent findings has provided a clearer understanding of the Milky Way than ever before. Just a few weeks before Reid's announcement, Martin Pohl, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University, revealed the most detailed map to date of the galaxy's spiral arms. Pohl's map establishes that there are two symmetric arms in the inner part of the galaxy that branch off into four - answering a question that astrophysicists have grappled with for 50 years. (According to Pohl, our solar system is located near one of the branching-off points, about...
...including its elusive inner galaxy, which is "really complicated and weird," Pohl says, because of the gravitational pull of a large bar of matter located at the center; the map will be particularly useful to a research group in France that has been studying dark matter, which, as Reid's team has established, the Milky Way has a lot more of than previous studies had revealed. Dark matter, so called because it gives off little or no light, is one of the most abundant elements in the universe (it constitutes 23% of the universe's total density, whereas normal atoms...
...Obama. With Blagojevich facing the prospect of federal charges and impeachment, the pick has caused a maelstrom within the Democratic Party. Officials from Illinois secretary of state Jesse White, whose refusal to certify Burris' selection was used as an excuse to invalidate the appointment, to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who ordered Burris to be turned away from the building, have sworn to fight the selection. Still, standing in the rain outside the Capitol, Burris, who is scheduled to meet with Reid on Wednesday, vowed to battle on. "I will now be consulting my attorneys on how to move forward...