（外文电子版资料）Benford, Gregory - Life at Galactic Center.pdfVIP

file:///F|/rah/Gregory%20Benford/Gregory%20Benford%20-%20Life%20At%20Galactic%20Center.txt GREGORY BENFORD LIFE AT GALACTIC CENTER Were not in a lucky part of the galaxy, at least for views. Our sun is tucked down in the disks plane, though this took centuries to realize. In retrospect, perhaps it is puzzling that astronomers did not guess until the nineteenth century that the Milky Way is a disk, seen edge on. Ancients used water analogies to describe it, images of rivers and streams. How much easier matters might have been if we could have seen the truly gaudy attraction in all the galaxy, the brilliant center. Perhaps, thought, our ignorance is good luck. Dark dust clouds block our view in the constellation Sagittarius, so we cannot see in the optical frequencies beyond the edge of our local spiral arm. Beyond that are immense dark lanes, blotting out the next arm and the hub beyond. One way to see the center would be to live much nearer. But that could be fatal. The galactic center is about 25,000 light years away. We orbit about two thirds of the way out into the spiral disk, a benign, even boring neighborhood. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.2 light years away, an average stellar separation for our region, where there is a star in roughly every fifty cubic light years. Were we to approach the galactic hub, well past the dust clouds, we would find a halo of stars glowing brightly, growing ever denser. In 1932 Carl Jansky discovered that, to his shock, the galactic center was the brightest radio location in the sky, outshining even our sun. Something was going on. In the core, within a few light years of the exact center, there are a million stars within a single light year. On average, the nearer stars are only a hundredth of a light year away. This is only ten thousand times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Imagine having several stars so close they outshine the moon. As one might expect, this is bad news for solar