Hail The Robots

I want to reveal one of the greatest mysteries in science to you:

Look at this gif, notice any patterns in the orbits? I’m talking about the speeds. The planets orbiting around the Sun get slower the farther out they go.

Why is this? Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion.

The stars in the Milky Way orbit around the Galactic Center just as our planets do around the Sun. We find that the farther you get from the center of the galaxy… there’s approximately no change in orbital velocity.

Just like that, one of our most well-established tools in astronomy (Kepler’s Third Law) becomes ineffective for some reason.

It’s become apparent to astronomers that when something orbits around a center of mass, it’s orbital speed has a relationship with the distance from the center of mass.

Right now we don’t think most of the mass of the Milky Way is focused in the galactic center, but hidden in darkness surrounding the galaxy on all sides.

Clay Shirky on the death of newspapers:

When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.”

The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.