globular star clusters

[kathywhitefamily]

To whom it may concern,

I recently completed the Science Buddies Project " Finding the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy Using Globular Star Clusters ". However, I had a question concerning the procedure.
1) Is there a specific way to calculate/estimate how far my predicted center is from the true location? I know it won't be precise, but I would like to include the data in my conclusion if I can.

Thank you!

[AeroSE]

Hi kathywhitefamily,

I am not familiar with where your predicted center is. Or rather, how you are depicting that location. I quickly looked into the experiment and I copied step 11 below. I am not sure of the output from google earth, but it seems like this might provide you with the distance from your estimate to the true galactic center.

11. In the search bar, type "Galactic Center" to find the true center of the galaxy. How close was your guess?

Hope this helps,

AeroSE

[kathywhitefamily]

Thank you for your reply. We have executed this step. The question is..."how far is your prediction from the actual". How do we determine how close/far it is???

[AeroSE]

I am not familiar with the output that is generated from google earth and I cant download the program from where I am. I think we need to determine what is meant by close/far your prediction is.

Since this experiment seems to only be related to direction of the galactic center, and not distance, we only need to determine the difference in angle. I would treat the angular distance between your estimated position and the point depicted by google earth.

If you can, can you give the coordinates that are provided from you findings in google Earth?

Hope this helps,

AeroSE

[kathywhitefamily]

Thank you for your reply. Your response is intriguing. My student found a site that calculated the "actual" distance between stars. She was able to calculate the distance between her galactic center to the actual--in one case it was close (17 LY away. In another case, 29 LY). She did discuss the word, "close" as she was discussing Light Years, not miles. Thank you!