Cosmic

Something different for dortTASTIC, but still decidedly dorky. I found this picture and this information related to the picture while reading about the AFC on ESPN's Page 2.

This simply fascinates me on so many levels that I thought it should be included. Anyone that thinks we are alone in the universe has to be mistaken. The law of averages simply means there has to be life in a bunch of these places, I just hope I live long enough for some sort of contact.

Researchers led by Swinburne University of Technology, in Australia, released this map of the "nearby" cosmos. The map contains about 100,000 dots. The dots are not stars; each dot represents a galaxy, and galaxies are thought to average about 100 billion stars each. Thus the area depicted contains holds roughly 10 to the 15th power stars, a number far too huge to bother attempting to fathom. And the map merely shows galaxies nearby. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is at the center of the map. On the cosmic scale, a place with 100 billion stars is a dot.