The Galaxy song with added uncertainties

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown

And things seem hard or tough

And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft

And you feel that you’ve had quite enough.

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving

And revolving at nine ten hundred and thirty seven miles an hour

That’s orbiting at nineteen eighteen point five miles a second, so it’s reckoned

A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me and all the stars that you can see

Are moving at a eleven point eight million miles a day

In an outer spiral arm at forty four hundred and ninety thousand miles an hour

Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a two to four hundred billion stars

It’s a hundred to a hundred and twenty thousand light years side to side

It bulges in the middle fifteen to sixteen thousand light years thick

But out by us it’s just nine hundred to three thousand light years wide.

We’re twenty six to thirty thousand light years from galactic central point

We go ‘round every two hundred million years

And our galaxy is only on of millions of billions

In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding

In all of the directions it can whizz

As fast as it can go, the speed of light you know

Twelve Eleven million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is.

So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure

How amazingly unlikely is your birth

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space

‘cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

Taking a look at this I think we can all agree that Eric Idle is a genius; making a memorable and accurate (to within an order of magnitude) song about our galaxy adding his own special flare of comedy to a fantastic amount of information contained within its facts.  

In places I have been pedantic, in others I have added the uncertainty range that we have deduced. It is amazing how little we actually know about our own galaxy but this song is a great place to start to bring the picture together.

What’s next?

Check out some of these links for the numbers we know about our galaxy.

The structure of the Milky Way - https://dept.astro.lsa.umich.edu/ugactivities/Labs/MWgalStruct/index.html

Our galaxy, the Milky Way - http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~george/ay20/Ay20-Lec16x.pdf

NASA world book, Galaxy - http://web.archive.org/web/20090412172631/http://mynasa.nasa.gov/worldbook/galaxy_worldbook.html

Monitoring stellar orbits around the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic center - http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4674

IMAGE CREDIT: Jeff Ball taken from his blog http://www.earthandskyphoto.com/imported-20091124163944/2010/7/21/milky-way-over-balanced-rock.html