[saintgimp]

It really is that empty. Science fiction movies mess up our perception, but reality is way more mind-boggling that we realize.

Check this out: if you want to build a model galaxy to scale and you start with the Sun as a two-foot-diameter exercise ball, how far away do you have to travel before you can set down a smaller ball that represents Alpha Centauri, our nearest(-ish) stellar neighbor?

10,993.3 miles.

Just bask in that for a while.

(http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/)

[saintgimp]

Although to be fair, dust is definitely a problem if you want to see into the center of the galaxy which is why most of the observations of Sagittarius A* are done in the infrared or near-infrared spectrum, which can penetrate dust. It's also why we can't see clear across our galaxy to make out what's beyond it, so we don't know what the Great Attractor is.

[tehaugmenter]

It is empty, but its filled with "Space Grease"

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/27/space-is-ful...

[monocasa]

> found enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter

What an incredibly useless unit of measurement. They somehow found something worse than "olympic size swimming pools".

[logfromblammo]

How many packs of butter per Library of Congress?

The problem is that most people just cannot conceptualize really, really, really large numbers, but journalists and authors try to make them more relatable anyway, and end up just making it worse.

I think what they meant to say was that it could make a typical globular cluster satellite of the Milky Way galaxy, containing about 225000 butter-stars with the same mass as our sun.

[Sean1708]

> I think what they meant to say was that it could make a typical globular cluster satellite of the Milky Way galaxy, containing about 225000 butter-stars with the same mass as our sun.

I don't think it was anything near that complex: 40 trillion trillion trillion is just the number of tubs of butter it takes to get 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes if you assume each tub is 250 grams.

[logfromblammo]

Even then,

  10^3 = thousand
  10^6 = million
  10^9 = billion
  10^12 = trillion
  10^15 = quadrillion, or thousand trillion
  10^18 = quintillion, or million trillion
  10^21 = sextillion, or billion trillion
  10^24 = heptillion, or trillion trillion
  10^27 = octillion, or thousand trillion trillion
  10^30 = nonillion, or million trillion trillion
  10^33 = decillion, or billion trillion trillion
  10^36 = undecillion, or trillion trillion trillion

One of those numbering conventions is not tremendously useful, and the other is very very very stupid. It compounds with the knowledge that some people call 10^9 "a milliard" rather than "a billion". This is why we have SI unit prefixes, and write numbers ending with an exponent of 10.

And here I was, assuming each "pack of butter" was one of those 10g single-serving packs (although some are only 7.65g). I didn't check it against the "tonnes" number in the article. In the US, a "pack of butter" could also be a box containing 4 sticks 113 g each, totaling 454 grams, because butter in the US is sold by the pound. Apparently, they are 250g elsewhere.

And a (metric) tonne is already 1000 kg, or 1 Mg. There is also the long ton, which is 1016 kg, and the short ton, which is 907 kg.

The obfuscated number is therefore 1x10^40 g, which is even larger than standard metric prefixes can express, so we'd probably write it as 1x10^37 kg, for some reason.

So my previous math was wrong. That's 5 million butter-stars the size of our sun, or enough butter to form a slippery, spreadable black hole as massive as the one at the heart of our galaxy. I guess from this, we can calculate the size of Audthumbla the giant space-cow?