Dying Star Weaves a Trillion-Mile-Wide Spiral In the Sky

I can't do Libraries of Congress for linear distance, but I think there's something better than a trillion miles.

So I asked Google for "1 trillion miles in au". An astronomical unit (1 AU) is the Sun-to-Earth orbit's average radius. I forget how many miles that is, and that's kind of the point.

1 trillion miles = 10757.8002 Astronomical Units

To put that in perspective, Earth is in a middle ring of our solar system. Pluto is way out there. I ignored other far-flung rocks like Xena or Gabrielle or whatever they're calling them these days.

Google's Calculator doesn't memorize "radius of pluto's orbit in au" but on the Pluto Fact Sheet [nasa.gov] I found Semimajor axis (AU) 39.48168677.

Diameter of our solar system is then ~80 AU. I did look up the heliopause for a farther "edge of our solar system, and got Starting in May 2012 at 120 AU, Voyager 1 detected a sudden increase in cosmic rays, an apparent signature of approach to the heliopause.. Both are miniscule compared to ~10800 AU for this article's celestial feature.

I remembered that the nearest neighbor star is roughly 4 light years away. Let's not quibble about precision, one digit is enough.

4 light years = 252,958.905 Astronomical Units

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/QANeDR_QNWA/dying-star-weaves-a-trillion-mile-wide-spiral-in-the-sky

j.k. rowling j.k. rowling axl rose google earnings pat burrell hilary rosen grilled cheese