HOW THE MILKY WAY GOT ITS NAME AND WHAT IT’S CALLED IN OTHER LANGUAGES

Today I found out why our galaxy is called the Milky Way and what it’s called in other languages.

No, it has nothing to do with the candy bar. Like many words we use today, the English name of our galaxy is derived from its Latin name: Via Lactea. Translated, that means “the road of milk.” The Romans actually got the name from the Greeks, who called our galaxy “galaxias kyklos” or “milky circle.” Incidentally, the Greek name is also where we get the term “galaxy.”

No one knows exactly who came up with the name, but it isn’t difficult to see how the name came about. From Earth, at least if you’re well outside the boundaries of city lights, our galaxy looks something like a band of milky light over a black background, as we are viewing it on it’s side and the billions of distant stars in our galaxy create a nice visible band of light.

As for why the ancient Greeks called it the “milky circle,” the myth goes that Zeus brought Heracles to Hera to suckle when she was sleeping. Hera was in conflict with the little infant, as you would be if your husband brought home a half-mortal child that wasn’t yours. As baby Heracles was having his meal, Hera woke up suddenly and pushed him away, resulting in a few drops of spilt milk. The drops created the galaxy that is now known as the Milky Way.

Various other languages have translations of “Milky Way” as the name of the galaxy, such as the German “Milchstrasse” and the Norwegian “Melkeveien.” There are, however, many other mythological origin stories that explain the various alternate names of the Milky Way in other languages.

In Finland, the Milky Way is called “Linnunrata,” or “path of the birds.” In Finnish Mythology, the world was formed from a waterfowl’s egg bursting. The sky was the shell of the egg, and the Earth as we know it was flat. At the edges of the Earth was “Lintukoto,” or the home of the birds. Lintukoto was a warm region where birds migrated during the winter. The band of light that the Greeks thought of as milk was, according to the Finns, the path that the birds took on their way to Lintukoto. Thus, it’s Linnunrata, “path of the birds.”

Armenia has a different idea about the Milky Way. There, it’s called hard goghi chanaparh, or “Straw Thief’s Way.” The story goes that the god Vahagn stole cartloads of straw Barsham, the Assyrian King, and took it to Armenia during a particularly cold winter. To get there, he fled across the Heavens and dropped some straw on the way, making the Milky Way.

Likewise, the Milky Way is called various forms of “straw way” in several other languages across Central Asia and Africa. It’s Ça Taxina Taça in Chechen, or “the route of scattered straw;” traditionally “kumova slama” or “Godfather’s Straw” in Croatian, though Milky Way is also used now in Croatia; and samanyolu or “road of straw” in Turkish. It’s likely that Arabs heard the story in Armenia first and spread the name to various other lands.

In many northern countries, the Milky Way is called the “Winter Way,” such as the Icelandic “vetrarbrautin,” the alternative Norwegian “vinterbrauta,” and the Swedish “vintergatan.” The reason for this is thought to be because, in the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way is more visible during the winter.

In much of East Asia, the galaxy is referred to as the “Silver River.” A Chinese legend says that once upon a time, there was a beautiful young maiden named the Goddess Weaver, the daughter of the Celestial Queen Mother. One day, a Buffalo Boy was tending his herd when he spied the Goddess Weaver bathing in a nearby lake. The two instantly fell in love, and were soon married and produced two children. But the Celestial Queen Mother grew jealous of their love and stole the Goddess Weaver away. When the Buffalo Boy pursued them, the Queen took out a pin and drew a silver river between them so that they would be separated forever. That silver river was the Milky Way. In Japan and Korea “silver river” means galaxies in general, not just the Milky Way.

In Spanish, the Milky Way is called a few different things. First, via lactea, or the Milky Way.Camino de Santiago means the “Road of Santiago” or “Road to Santiago,” and was used for the Milky Way because pilgrims used it to guide them to Santiago de Compostela, a holy site.Compostela is the third way to say the name of the galaxy, and this one is perhaps the most accurate of all the different names. It literally means “the field of stars.”

The Milky Way Over Tenerife
Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado (TWAN)

Explanation: Have you ever seen the band of our Milky Way Galaxy? Chances are you have never seen it like this — nor could you. In a clear sky from a dark location at the right time, a faint band of light is visible across the sky. This band is the disk of our spiral galaxy. Since we are inside this disk, the band appears to encircle the Earth. The above spectacular picture of the Milky Way arch, however, goes where the unaided eye cannot. The image is actually a deep digital fusion of nine photos that create a panorama fully 360 across. Taken recently in Teide National Park inTenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, the image includes the Teide volcano, visible near the image center, behind a volcanic landscape that includes many large rocks. Far behind these Earthly structures are many sky wonders that are visible to the unaided eye, such as the band of the Milky Way, the bright waxing Moon inside the arch, and the Pleiades open star cluster (can you find it?). The deep exposure also brings out many sky wonders normally beyond human perception, many of which are labelled on the annotated image version, including Barnard’s Loop, visible above as the half red ring below the Milky Way band.

Bonus Facts:

A popular festival in Japan is Tanabata, a star festival. The festival has its origins in the “Silver River” myth. On the seventh day of the seventh month each year, the Goddess Weaver and the Buffalo Boy are allowed to meet for just one day. The people celebrate with a day off work or school, and they write wishes on pieces of paper which are then hung from trees. In some cities, people light lanterns to float in nearby rivers. It’s likely that the celebration got its start in China some 2000 years ago before it migrated to Japan, where it really kicked off.
The Milky Way is thought to contain over 100 billion stars, and could contain up to 400 billion. It’s about 100,000 light years across.
Along with orbiting around the Sun at 66,600 mph, the Earth is also rotating at its axis at about 1,070 miles per hour. So you are simultaneously hurtling around the sun at 66,600 mph while sitting on a rock that is spinning at 1,070 mph. On top of that, our whole solar system is rocketing through space around the center of the Milky Way at around 559,234 mph. On top of that, our galaxy is hurtling through space at around 671,080 mph, with respect to our local group of galaxies. On top of that, for all we know, our entire Universe is hurtling through some unknown medium at some other ridiculous speed.
The most common star in our galaxy is the red dwarf, which is about 1/10 the mass of the sun. Around half the stars are older than the sun, which needs some 4.5 billion candles on its next birthday cake.

Source gizmodo.com

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Instead of Waiting for E.T. to Phone, Let’s Call E.T.

Finding an intelligent alien civilization would easily rank among the most profound discoveries in human history.

So far, though, there are no signs of communicating extraterrestrial life, no messages from the stars suggesting that humans are not alone in the universe. Maybe, some scientists argue, it’s time for us to take a more active role in the interstellar conversation. Instead of simply eavesdropping on the cosmos as we’ve done for the past half-century, perhaps Earth should begin transmitting messages to the stars – big, blazing telegrams meant to prompt an extraterrestrial reply.

But actively sending signals into the cosmos is more than a slightly controversial idea. Recently, a statement posted online asserted that messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) carries “unknown and potentially enormous implications and consequences.” Signed by a number of well-known scientists – and people such as Elon Musk – the missive asks that a vigorous international debate take place before any new messages are sent.

That debate erupted at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, where several contentious exchanges broke out as scientists gathered to discuss the pros and cons of interstellar messaging.

“We should launch active SETI as an ongoing complement to our traditional passive SETI projects,” said Doug Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute. “It’s a matter of diversifying our search strategies.”

But undertaking a targeted interstellar messaging campaign without considering the potential consequences is foolish, argued astrophysicist and science fiction author David Brin. The seeming lone voice of dissent among the convened panelists, Brin noted that attracting the attention of an unknown advanced civilization could bring potentially disastrous results. And, he said, it’s impossible to predict whether aliens are going to play nice or be real jerks.

“This is the only really important scientific field without any subject matter,” Brin said. “It’s an area in which opinion rules, and everyone has a very fierce opinion.”

Right now, there are no official messages waiting in Earth’s interstellar outbox. But Vakoch and others are floating the suggestion of using the Arecibo Observatory’s mega-powerful transmitter to send a series of messages in the down time between the observatory’s other studies. It wouldn’t cost much at all, and it would join the ongoing campaigns to listen for alien transmissions. While the question of what to include in those messages is obviously important, it’s taking a backseat to the issue of whether those messages should be sent at all.

“Active SETI, I gotta admit, is a controversial topic,” Vakoch remarked.

Despite the ongoing controversy, it wouldn’t be the first time interstellar messages have been beamed into space. A handful of transmissions have already left Earth’s shores and set sail across the cosmos. Perhaps the best known of these messages was sent from Arecibo in 1974, as part of a ceremony marking the completion of an upgrade to the giant radio telescope. Composed by astronomer Frank Drake, the message has been hurtling through space at the speed of light, destined to intersect in 25,000 years with a globular star cluster in the constellation Hercules.

And then there’s all the stuff that’s wafting into space without any such effort from Earthlings. These murmurs from Earth include the high frequency chirping of military radars, TV and radio transmissions, and the interplanetary radar used to study numerous asteroids in the solar system. Recently, technologies like cell phones and cable TV have turned Earth into a slightly quieter pale blue dot, but for many decades, our intra-planetary communications were easily leaking into space.

True, those signals are much harder to detect than a blast of directed radio waves from Arecibo, but SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak argued that any civilization advanced enough to show up and annihilate the planet is also advanced enough to detect those murmurs. In fact, he notes, our technology isn’t too far from being able to do the same. “We are within one or two centuries of being able to find the equivalent of ourselves,” he said.

In other words, it’s too late to shut up and hide.

But Brin isn’t buying it. And he bristles at the suggestion that he and his colleagues are simply worried about “slathering Cardassian invaders.” Instead, he implores, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a conversation about the potential ramifications of METI before we begin shouting into the void?

It does seem like a conversation is beginning to take place.

At the meeting, several panelists attempted to cut through the supposition and opinion by drawing analogies between METI and other controversies. Astrobiologist David Grinspoon noted the obvious link between METI and NASA’s Planetary Protection Office, created to prevent biological contaminants from being passed between Earth and other solar system bodies. “That’s a discussion that’s been had internationally, and I think that’s quite relevant here,” Grinspoon said. He also noted that fears of extraterrestrial intelligences with nefarious intent are not dissimilar to concerns about the motivations of artificial intelligence.

“That certainly presents an existential threat. It may be tiny — people have different opinions on it – but how are we dealing with that?” Grinspoon asked, noting that no one has shut down artificial intelligence research.

Later, federal judge David Tatel offered the rather salient observation that this debate is not unlike the controversy swirling around dual-use research on harmful pathogens, where learning more about nasty viruses could be used to engineer an especially potent bioweapon. And noted similarities with the current debate over geoengineering and how to combat climate change.

“Both of these have similarities with active SETI,” he said. “Both could produce great benefits or have catastrophic consequences.”

Source phenomena.nationalgeographic.com

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