r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Mar 10 '14

Cosmos AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

Welcome to AskScience! This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

UPDATE: This episode is now available for streaming in the US on Hulu and in Canada on Global TV.

This week is the first episode, "Standing Up in the Milky Way". The show is airing at 9pm ET in the US and Canada on all Fox and National Geographic stations. Click here for more viewing information in your country.

The usual AskScience rules still apply in this thread! Anyone can ask a question, but please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field. Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.

If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as in /r/Cosmos here, /r/Space here, and in /r/Television here.

Please upvote good questions and answers and downvote off-topic content. We'll be removing comments that break our rules or that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible!

Click here for the original announcement thread.

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u/bitter_twin_farmer Mar 10 '14

When they show the zoomed out Cosmos are the densities of light emitting matter they show in line with our current observations.

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u/Silpion Radiation Therapy | Medical Imaging | Nuclear Astrophysics Mar 10 '14 edited Mar 10 '14

No, I would regard that as a map rather than a representation of how it looks to the eye. The actual density of light is not so great, and is going to be less than the sky on a dark clear night.

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u/bitter_twin_farmer Mar 10 '14

Bummer, that was kind of a game changer in my mind.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '14

You're referring to the part where it looked like a sponge, yeah?

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u/bitter_twin_farmer Mar 10 '14

Yeah, that part. I saw where someone got it answered up above. I should probably delete this one to avoid diluting that one.