Ever wonder what our Milky Way Galaxy looks like from afar? Here's the best look you are likely to ever get -- a look-alike galaxy some 174 million-trillion miles away. Light takes 30 million years to travel to our eyes from the spiral galaxy, NGC 6744 resides in the southern hemisphere constellation of Pavo (The Peacock), according to a European Southern.
Although our galaxy is quite large, at about 100,000 light years across (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles), NGC 6744 is about twice as wide.
Our sun circles the Milky Way, in the suburbs more than 25,000 light years from its center, within the disk of stars surrounding our galaxy.
Human ancestors were Mama's Boys
Males of two early human species were Mama's Boys, suggest paleo-anthropologists, with females moving in with the in-laws about two million years ago, and their mates staying put.
In the Nature journal study led by Sandi Copeland of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, researchers looked at the teeth of two pre-human species found in two South African caves. Strontium isotopes in the teeth, taken from 19 individuals, reveal traces of where the creatures lived during childhood, when their adult teeth formed.
"We found at least 50% of the females did not grow up in the area where they died," Copeland said, in a press briefing. Among the males, 90% died near where they grew up.
The finding suggests the two early human species, Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, both lived lives similar to chimps, where females at maturity often leave their troop to join another. A. afrarenis is widely thought of as a possible ancestor to modern humans.
A diet of grass, tubers and seeds seems to have been where the early human species picked up the strontium, comparable to background levels from rock strata of the same age in the cave regions. Similar comparisons found that Otzi, the famous 5,300-year-old iceman mummy of the Alps likely grew up in a valley miles from where he died.
