Galactic Tick Day
September 29, 2016 7:48 AM Subscribe
September 29, 2016 is Galactic Tick Day, a celebration of our progress around the milky way.
Our planet Earth, along with the rest of the Solar System travels around the galactic center of the Milky Way Galaxy every 225 million Earth years. One centi-arcsecond of this rotation is called a Galactic Tick. A Galactic Tick happens every 633.7 days, or 1.7361 years.
Galactic Tick Day is set aside to acknowledge our Sun's motion, our progress around the home galaxy, and to celebrate humanity's knowledge of this motion.
Note: No spoons were harmed in the creation of this FPP.
The 235th Galactic Tick Day is September 29th, 2016. Let’s celebrate together!
Our planet Earth, along with the rest of the Solar System travels around the galactic center of the Milky Way Galaxy every 225 million Earth years. One centi-arcsecond of this rotation is called a Galactic Tick. A Galactic Tick happens every 633.7 days, or 1.7361 years.
Galactic Tick Day is set aside to acknowledge our Sun's motion, our progress around the home galaxy, and to celebrate humanity's knowledge of this motion.
Note: No spoons were harmed in the creation of this FPP.
The 235th Galactic Tick Day is September 29th, 2016. Let’s celebrate together!
Every time the Earth makes one complete loop around the sun, humans celebrate the journey with some kind of New Year's holiday. So why won't we celebrate every time our solar system completes one loop around the center of the galaxy?Get Ready To Celebrate "Galactic Tick Day" This September
-- Space
Our lives are divided, in terms of time, according to the movement of astronomical objects. Earth’s rotation on itself and around the Sun creates the basis for our days and years, but our movement around the galaxy is not really celebrated. [So] a group of science enthusiasts has launched Galactic Tick Day . . .You Should Celebrate Galactic Tick Day, the New Holiday That Spans the Milky Way
Obviously, a loop of the Milky Way is not a human-friendly time, so the minds behind the project picked a small fraction of the 225 million years it takes the Sun to complete a full galactic orbit.
The Sun’s orbit is circular enough that it can be divided into 360 degrees, but each degree is still hundreds of thousands of years. The degree, however, has subdivisions that can be divided into 60 parts – the arcminutes – and each arcminute can also be divided into 60 arcseconds. This is still beyond the human lifespan, so they picked a smaller interval by dividing the arcsecond by 100.
-- I F L Science
David Sneider, a 26-year-old software entrepreneur from San Francisco, had this epiphany during a hike four months ago. He wondered aloud how people's perceptions would change if they really realized the one fixed point in their celestial understanding, the mighty sun, was also in flux. . . . Sneider and three other people invented a holiday.
On earth, this Galactic Tick happens every 633.7 days. . . . "The whole thought is to scale down to something more digestible, to a human time scale. And it's sort of fun, because the date will always change. It won't always be September 29."
To get a start date for the holiday, the foursome selected . . . the day Hans Lippershey filed his patent for the first telescope in October 1608. "There is a certain amount of arbitrariness with the numbers we picked," Sneider conceded.
But the point of Galactic Tick Day is to celebrate the idea that human beings are clever and self-aware enough to even know we're part of a vast cosmos. Sneider hopes to inspire a new perspective in anyone who can look up and imagine our entire solar system careening through the galaxy . . . [to] inspire new ways of thinking, the same way astronauts view the Earth in a different way after seeing our planet from orbit. . . ."That deep sense that we are connected."
-- Popular Mechanics
Hold on while I grab my towel.
posted by joecacti at 7:52 AM on September 29, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by joecacti at 7:52 AM on September 29, 2016 [8 favorites]
Um...Spoon!?
posted by briank at 7:55 AM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by briank at 7:55 AM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
Glad we're finally ready to celebrate the achievements of ticks all across the galaxy. I can only dream of the diseases spread and blood slurped by the massive engorged ticks of Regulon B7.
posted by selfnoise at 7:55 AM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by selfnoise at 7:55 AM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]
Wow, Lyme disease has spread much farther than I realized.
posted by the_blizz at 7:59 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by the_blizz at 7:59 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Having recently stumbled my way though a swarm of deer tick larvae, 150+ of whom sank their itchy little probosces in my skin, I am unspeakably relieved to discover the true topic of this post.
posted by feral_goldfish at 8:00 AM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by feral_goldfish at 8:00 AM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
Just submerge your planet in a giant molecular cloud for a few million years and it'll drop right off.
posted by mubba at 8:05 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by mubba at 8:05 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
*sees title, all excited*
*comes into thread*
Oh...science...boring...interest...fading...
posted by nubs at 8:07 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
*comes into thread*
Oh...science...boring...interest...fading...
posted by nubs at 8:07 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Yay! Only 359.999997222° to go!
posted by mondo dentro at 8:08 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by mondo dentro at 8:08 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
Played, as always, by Galactic Patrick Warburton.
posted by Splunge at 8:11 AM on September 29, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by Splunge at 8:11 AM on September 29, 2016 [7 favorites]
Ugh, the sun thinks it's so great. I'm tired of this heliocentricity.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 8:13 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 8:13 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
posted by nubs at 8:19 AM on September 29, 2016 [7 favorites]
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
posted by nubs at 8:19 AM on September 29, 2016 [7 favorites]
Needs more galactic opossums to eat the galactic ticks...
posted by Jacob G at 8:20 AM on September 29, 2016
posted by Jacob G at 8:20 AM on September 29, 2016
Ooh nice, I felt the Earth move!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2016
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2016
Couldn't they just call it Galac-tick? Or does that sound too much like a cross between Galactus and the Tick? "Spoon!... to eat the Earth with."
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Every galactic tick day, the Andromeda galaxy is 6 billion kilometers closer to crashing into the Milky Way.
posted by sfenders at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by sfenders at 8:25 AM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
This is going to be just like when that guy said the Earth went around the Sun. Surely we can all agree that the Earth is stationary and that the Galaxy rotates around the Earth, as God intended. Galactocentrism is so last year tick.
posted by marienbad at 8:26 AM on September 29, 2016
posted by marienbad at 8:26 AM on September 29, 2016
Dammit, I already wrote 234 on a check this morning.
posted by Etrigan at 8:32 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Etrigan at 8:32 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not
posted by hippybear at 8:37 AM on September 29, 2016
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not
posted by hippybear at 8:37 AM on September 29, 2016
That explains the dizzy spells.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:38 AM on September 29, 2016
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:38 AM on September 29, 2016
Just 13284961 galactic tick days to go before Smith's Cloud, a nearby incoming high-velocity gas cloud, collides with the the galactic disk. SPOON!
posted by sfenders at 8:56 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by sfenders at 8:56 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
22 comments and nobody has noted/celebrated that Amazon Video has committed to a full season of the newest version of The Big Blue Guy? Obviously, they should have held off their announcement until today.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:35 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:35 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]
This is based on the arbitrary degree system, not the elegant radian system. I'm doing my own Tick Day every 13071.1 days! That's one millionth of one radian of the sun's path. See you guys in July 2052, it'll be rad.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:04 PM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:04 PM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]
(I spent way too much time doing those calculations.)
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:04 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 2:04 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm rather glad none of my mechanical clocks tick once every centiarcsecond of rotation. (That's 1500 Hz, which would probably become irritating pretty quickly.)
On one hand, I can't imagine any possible harm that could come from this holiday. And I welcome any excuse to tell people who big (and old) space is. So, yay!
On the other hand, a centiarcsecond is a pretty wacky number. It only slightly makes sense given a weird mix of both Babylonian and decimal based historical choices. Celebrating our tiny place in the vast cosmos by marking every 1.296*10^8th of a revolution doesn't quite have the eternal, universal import one might have hoped for. Just going with 10^8 is also arbitrary, but at least it would be as simple as any other arbitrary number. Or, for that matter, 2^27th, which works out to the same thing to within 3%.
On preview, I see Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam and I mostly agree.
posted by eotvos at 2:05 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
On one hand, I can't imagine any possible harm that could come from this holiday. And I welcome any excuse to tell people who big (and old) space is. So, yay!
On the other hand, a centiarcsecond is a pretty wacky number. It only slightly makes sense given a weird mix of both Babylonian and decimal based historical choices. Celebrating our tiny place in the vast cosmos by marking every 1.296*10^8th of a revolution doesn't quite have the eternal, universal import one might have hoped for. Just going with 10^8 is also arbitrary, but at least it would be as simple as any other arbitrary number. Or, for that matter, 2^27th, which works out to the same thing to within 3%.
On preview, I see Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam and I mostly agree.
posted by eotvos at 2:05 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
Coo. I didn't know about Smith's Cloud - nor that according to the latest models, there should be aroud a thousand such things in our vicinity. The sooner we get up out of the Galactic plane and get a proper bead on things, the better.
As for what the 'proper' units are, surely we should start from the Planck units and work up from there? Although I'm sure that relativistic space-time geometry will muck up any attempt to attribute the entire galaxy with anything so outre as an absolute rotational speed. Doesn't it imply simultaneity in multiple frames? I say this not because I understand such things, but because whenever I think I understand a perfectly simple model at scale, Einstein normally pats me on the head and asks if I wouldn't be happier with a colouring book and some crayons.
posted by Devonian at 4:19 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
As for what the 'proper' units are, surely we should start from the Planck units and work up from there? Although I'm sure that relativistic space-time geometry will muck up any attempt to attribute the entire galaxy with anything so outre as an absolute rotational speed. Doesn't it imply simultaneity in multiple frames? I say this not because I understand such things, but because whenever I think I understand a perfectly simple model at scale, Einstein normally pats me on the head and asks if I wouldn't be happier with a colouring book and some crayons.
posted by Devonian at 4:19 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]
And he says to me, he says to me, you got Style, baby! but if you're gonna to be a real villain you gotta get a gimmick…and so I go I says Yeah Baby! A gimmick, that's it! One Tick! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!!!
/hope I die before I get old.
posted by Sphinx at 4:27 PM on September 29, 2016
/hope I die before I get old.
posted by Sphinx at 4:27 PM on September 29, 2016
Have they ever hooked the timing of our transit, with large events either in our solar system, or on our planet? Like in a certain area of our transit, we have bombardments? Or in a certain area of our transit we shed planets like fleas? Or we have major continental motion in response to other gravity forces? I don't know just wondering.
posted by Oyéah at 4:55 PM on September 29, 2016
posted by Oyéah at 4:55 PM on September 29, 2016
Reading more about Smith's Cloud (thanks, stenders), there doesn't seem to be any effect caused by the galactic rotation per se, but it seems as if the galaxy is moving like a hungry vortex-cum-buzzsaw through intergalactic space, in which are also moving lots of clouds of hydrogen/helium gas left over from the early epochs of the Universe. These impact the galaxy and are shredded and pulled in further by gravity, and where they impact they form shock waves that trigger regions of star formation - the supernovae of which then seed elements into the galaxy and further shock waves which create later generations of stars with planets.
So it looks like our galaxy is still forming and coalescing from the primal matter, and depending on where and when the clouds get swept in, and the relative speeds, regions of space (including our own locale) can change quite dramatically.
Which is pretty darn nice to know.
Now fold in the roles of galactic nucleus supermassive black holes and dark matter, and we're done. Right?
posted by Devonian at 5:37 PM on September 29, 2016
So it looks like our galaxy is still forming and coalescing from the primal matter, and depending on where and when the clouds get swept in, and the relative speeds, regions of space (including our own locale) can change quite dramatically.
Which is pretty darn nice to know.
Now fold in the roles of galactic nucleus supermassive black holes and dark matter, and we're done. Right?
posted by Devonian at 5:37 PM on September 29, 2016
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posted by Herodios at 7:49 AM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]