What new wonders would we create in the future paths that we trail-blaze?

What I mean is that I have modest dreams and ambitions I would like to pursue before I die, I'm not trying to be president or a rockstar or anything like that. I just want to make the world a better place and maybe win a few hearts while i'm at it.

Engineering has been an unnecessary detour. One that I honestly could say I would be better off without.

Au revoir.

Dur dur dur, I am Science Communicator,,,

I don't think i'm ever gonna stop doing this stuff any time soon.

Thoughts on the Cosmos #3 Escape to the Spirals

When we last left off we were exploring the structure of Spiral galaxies by taking a look at the pieces and parts that make them up that make them up like the central bulge, the main disk where most of the stars are located and the encompassing Galactic Halo

One of the first thing you notice when looking at images of Spiral Galaxies taken by the Hubble or Spitzer Space Telescope are the massive spirals themselves that come in a variety of different twisting shapes and sizes.

The Bright Glowing Arms of Spiral Galaxies represent regions of space dense with gas and dust clouds some as big as 300 light years in diameter that is about the stretch of 20 million times the distance from Earth to the Sun. They are big big clouds of gas and dust in outer space. These clouds are the material that would, given enough time and a little bit of physics, form stars, planetary systems, moons, and given perhaps even more time living organisms like you and me, human beings and all the plants and animals of planet Earth.

The Spiral Arms of a Galaxy represent the beginning of life of much of the Solar System we see today.

Somewhere, somehow it all began in a Spiral Arm.

Curiously enough you wonder why there are Spiral arms in the first place if not for the nerdier half of the human race to use images of the Andromeda Galaxy as Space Porn

Hot Damn, look at those curves!

More than half of all the Galaxies in the Universe are Spiral Galaxies and trust me there are a lot of galaxies out there. So if there is a Grand Designer to the Universe. He, she, or it must really have a thing for spirals.

                The Spiral Structure of the Milky Way that we all know and love exist because of two main forces. The rotation of stuff: stars and Gas clouds around the center of the galaxy and something in physics called standing waves. Think of it in our case as a spiraling shockwave travelling around the center of the galaxy

Like Shockwave from Transformers except more Spiral Shaped and not a Decepticon or made of metal

                The Spiral Arms that are largely shaped and carried by the shockwave travel at a much slower speed than the rotating matter. As the matter catches up to the spiral arms they are caught between the spiral arm shock wave and more matter crashing in behind it.

Think of it as a traffic pileup where much faster cars are crammed in behind a much slower truck. The spiral shockwave represents the slow moving truck (lorry) and all that matter represents the traffic of cars coming in from behind.

It’s this cramming and squeezing of matter trailing the spiral that causes the giant Gas clouds mentioned earlier to heat up and collapse to form stars.

This process I will go through in depth in a later video or you could watch a younger version of me give it a go in my Project Solaris video, Say High to past me guys

Big stars that form 20 times the mass of our sun shine bright and live fast but die young like a swole up body buikder that overdoses on too much juices

RIP Zyzz, RIP Zyzz

So they end up exploding while still inside the spiral producing blast waves that maintain the spiral shockwave and also seeding the Galaxy with the building blocks of life like the carbon in our apple pies the calcium in our teeth and the iron in our blood.

Matter that makes up smaller stars like our sun live long enough to escape the spiral arms and continue their journey as wanderers across the galaxy carrying with them the possibility of new planetary systems and intelligent life, carrying with them a new light among the stars.

This is why I love astronomy because it all comes back to us somehow, the more you look up the more you find your own self. It hits us very slowly at first then all at once to know that the life of The Sun began in a spiral arm and therefore the life of the planet earth and all of its inhabitants are also related. You start to appreciate not just the pictures of Galaxies more but also your own life as part of the wider cosmos.