I work out of our office on One Market Street in San Francisco. My standup-desk is right across from our Gallery at One Market. One of our newer exhibits is called Powers of Design. It was first featured at the Technology Entertainment & Design (TED) conference last year. Powers of Design depicts the size of everything from the inconceivably small to the mind-blowingly large. I thought I'd cover the exhibit elements, one at a time, over a few months. I started small and am working my way up.
The Triangulum Galaxy as photographed by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.
1020 MAGNITUDE
100,000,000,000,000,000,000 m
10,000 Light-years
Triangulum Galaxy
50,000 Light-years
Why would a spiral galaxy be named after a triangle, you ask? The Triangulum Galaxy (M33) resides in the constellation of the same name (for its resemblance to the Greek letter delta). Located 3 million light-years from Earth, it’s the third-largest (lots of threes going on here) member of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way and Andromeda.
With a diameter of 50,000 light-years, it contains the largest stellar-mass black hole known (15.7 times the mass of the sun), is home to 40 billion stars and is one of the most distant permanent objects visible to the naked eye.
A black hole is a region of space and time from which gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform space and time to form a black hole. Stephen Hawking's work postulates that around a black hole there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return.
Thanks to Global Content Manager, Matt Tierney, for the images and text that comprise the exhibit element. This is just one of the many exhibits in the gallery at One Market in San Francisco. The gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays from 12 pm to 5 pm, and admission is free. Visit us.
Previous posts on this topic include:
- 10-15 Protons and Neutrons
- 10-14 Atomic Nucleus of a Uranium Atom
- 10-13 Nada, Zilch, Zero, Zip
- 10-12 Gamma Rays
- 10-11 Fluorine Ion
- 10-10 Wavelength of Hard X-Rays
- 10-9 Carbon Nanotubes
- 10-8 Molecular Transport Nano Robot
- 10-7 HIV Virus
- 10-6 Red Blood Cells
- 10-5 Sand
- 10-4 Microelectromechanical Systems
- 10-3 Sonata Silicium Watch Components
- 10-2 Lego
- 10-1 Prosthetic Fairing
- 100 Biome Concept Car
- 101 Ma'erkang Housing Reconstruction
- 102 Shanghai Tower
- 103 Bay Bridge
- 104 Masdar City
- 105 Palm Islands
- 106 The Moon
- 107 Earth
- 108 Jupiter
- 109 The Sun
- 1010 Distance Light Travels in 34 Seconds
- 1011 Distance from Jupiter to the Sun
- 1012 Distance from Pluto to the Sun
- 1013 Voyager 2
- 1014 The Solar System
- 1015 Cat's Eye Nebula
- 1016 Pillars of Creation
- 1017 Great Orion Nebula
- 1018 M15 Globular Cluster
- 1019 Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy
Future blog posts will cover:
- 1021 The Milky Way
- 1022 IC 1101
- 1023 Local Group of Galaxies
- 1024 The Local Supercluster
- 1025 3C 273
- 1026 Outer Limit of the Universe
Measurement is alive in the lab.