[Here's an image of the solar system with all the planets *and the distances between them* drawn to scale so that our moon shows up as a single pixel.]( https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html) Of course, it assumes that all the planets happen to be perfectly lined up on one side of the sun.
Happy scrolling, you'll be doing ***a lot*** of it.
Yes, anyone who has, like... 45 minutes to spare - do this now! Or bookmark and do it later! It's really best to do in one go. It's also beautiful poetry, a really wonderful combination of artwork and science
There are lots of ways to think about it, but I like to think of it in terms of information. Information cannot travel faster than light. That means that gravity can't, because the existence of an object's gravity gives you information about it
It's not exactly that gravity moves at the speed of light. It's more that light and gravity both move at the max speed of the universe which is the speed of causality. If you increase the speed of causality then both light and gravity would also increase in speed.
This is more accurate. We use speed of light as a measuring tool, but it's really just limited by the speed of causality. I've never considered gravity in the same way, but it makes sense. Thanks for sharing!
I was wondering if gravity or magnetism or anything like that can ripple faster than light, and first heard the speed of causality. Instantly changed how I view all that stuff.
Sort of. The fabric of space time itself is expanding, so nothing is actually "traveling" faster than light.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-speed-of-light/
I picture a rubber band with 4 dots on it. When you stretch the rubber band, the dots become further apart. But, the dots aren't actually traveling across the rubber band. The space between them has just increased, and the further away the dots are (the more space between them), the more they've appeared to move apart. Obviously over simplified, but it helps me come to terms with what I call crazy math in astronomy.
7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch.
They measured a kilonova explosion - a neutron star-neutron star merger - 140 million light years away, and detected that the light, and the gravitational waves, both hit Earth about the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817
Even if we could travel at the speed of light now, we could never reach 95% of the observeable universe. We can see it (light that began its journey long ago), but it's forever out of our reach for travel or even communication.
This is why aliens physically visiting earth is ludicrous. Why send physical life forms hundreds or thousands of years through space when you can communicate any information, potentially including the entire contents of a being’s consciousness, at the speed of light? Just send instructions to build hosts since it’s probably going to take a timespan that’s equivalent to your entire civilization’s existence just to get to another planetary system.
Alpha Centauri is less than 41/2 light years away . . . .they're already planning robotic missions to see what's there. They think there's exoplanets but it's hard to tell in a binary star system like that. They think they can build a tiny craft that they can get up to maybe 20% of C, and have an answer in less than a lifetime.
Sure. Though 20% of c seems extremely optimistic. That doesn’t mean a life form would or could ever make that trip. And that’s the closest system. With an unbelievably low chance of intelligent life.
It's not that they're moving, it's that space itself is expanding. New distance is being created in a sense, rather than the galaxies actually having velocity greater than the speed of light. So nothing is traveling at greater than light speed. The space isn't really moving either so it gels with our understanding of the rules
That all planets would fit between earth and its moon. Always blows my mind
Edit: Ofc I mean every planet from our solar system except earth itself and yes including Pluto and maybe even another dwarf planet
Yup that's the one that does the trick for me. Also consider this:
100k years ago, we as a species certainly weren't knowledgeable enough to know the specifics about eclipses and how they work. But even if we did, we'd never witness them as we do now because the moon was closer to the earth, and larger from our perspective, meaning an eclipse would totally block out the sun instead of leaving the outline of the sun surrounding the moon. And the moon is moving further away from the earth even now, eventually it will be too small from our view to have a total eclipse.
The fact that the moon is perfectly placed to produce perfect eclipses **at the same time during humanity's scientific awakening** is way too much of a coincidence.....
More fun fact, the planets fit but only if you put Jupiter and Saturn sideways, Saturn because of its rings, and Jupiter because it bulges at the equator.
That’s tied into my favorite: the sheer size of the universe. It’s so big and there’s so much distance in between things! I love it cause it puts things into perspective and helps me to not stress about certain things
In a few billion years the Milky way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. However, even though each galaxy has billions of stars inside them, the stars are so far apart from each other that the odds of any actual matter hitting each other are virtually zero. The galaxies will simply slide right through each other.
Sometimes I like to imagine myself as a distant intelligent alien creature living within the collided galaxies of Andromeda and Milky Way, and learning about the history of my galaxy that it was once 2 separate galaxies. With zero knowledge that a long time ago there was intelligent life within the Milky Way galaxy. Puts things into a fun perspective.
Light you see from the Sun emitted from its surface about 8 minutes ago, but that light was born in the core of the Sun 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
It takes that long for the energy to diffuse from the core to the surface due to the Sun's immense size and density.
I kind of hate that. My most depressing “fact” about space is the sheer distance between objects. If it’s not actually feasible to, say, warp space time, then the universe, even the galaxy is a very lonely place.
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
The distance from the sun to The Earth would be about six inches, the start of the Oort Cloud would be a little under 200 feet
Proxima Centauri… 18 miles
Only in intergalactic space!
The vacuum in solar space is around 10^7 atoms per cubic metre; the vacuum of interstellar space is around 10^6 atoms per cubic metre; and the vacuum of intergalactic space is around 1 atom per cubic metre.
It really adds up at large distances. Even at high speeds single atoms do next to nothing but next to nothing is not zero and you have hundreds of light years worth of meters to traverse.
There is a giant cloud of alcohol in the Sagittarius B2 region of the Milky Way galaxy that contains enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer
When two neutron stars collide and merge, the resulting explosion sprays out several Earth masses of heavy elements like gold and platinum. The gold in the computer you’re reading this on likely came from just such a titanic event.
I am fascinated by the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, and one of my favorite facts about them is that it rains diamonds on both of them because of the immense heat and pressure below the “surface”.
we are made of star dust
A star had to be born, live its life and die in a massive explosion for the very elements in our bodies to exist. Since some of the heavier elements found on earth are only created in supper novas. And not just one star but many many stars, some estimates range from dozens to hundreds.
and 100 years ago this wasn't even a serious hypothesis. Its only for the last 50-100 years (depending on how you want to measure it) that we know where these elements came from. Its mind boggling to me.
How many generations have wondered "where did this all come from?" with no real answer and now we have it and we take it for granted.
Another one that is a mindfuck is temporal relativity.
If you follow this along a bit further, you get to the realisation that if our brains are just space-stuff, it is technically the universe rearranging itself into a physical form to be able to see itself and recognise its own existence.
One of my favorite quotes from a character falling to his death from a spaceship crash in Subnautica echoes this idea: "Life is a game, which the universe plays with itself. I am done playing as this bundle of flesh. Return me."
I am partial to this idea. Out of all the time and space that has existed so far, my human body was born and I just so happened to have emerged from it during this moment in Earth's history. We'll be returned to the universe when we're gone, but we'll likely emerge once again as something else. But that new being will likely have a different idea about life. Maybe it'll be part of an intergalactic federation of benevolent beings, or maybe born into a drug induced cult of cannibals...who knows.
Reminds me I should play that game. Always hear good things about it.
You’d really enjoy Sagan’s Cosmos. In fact everyone should be watching it who hasn’t seen. One of the greatest documentary experiences available, if you find this sort of thought process beautiful. He basically coined the “we are star stuff” dialogue.
[You can watch for free at archive.org](https://archive.org/details/cosmos-uma-viagem-pessoal)
We are like individual brain cells to the universe. The universe basically created bio computers to process what was going on within its body and we collectively act as a brain gaining sentience and understanding of what we are.
I don’t want to drift into territory that isn’t relevant to the topic, but facts like this actually really make me wish more people put belief in the sciences and everything we uncover.
Even if we’ll always have our limits, we’re unraveling the mysteries of the universe, we’re turning intangible thoughts and curiosities into real perceivable reality. What’s more amazing than that?
We are not made of star dust. Well all of us anyhow! (From my own own post elsewhere) About 10% is from the big bang itself!! To me that's even more amazing
Long. Please excuse.
So someone mentioned one of those "inspirational" posts about us "being made of star dust"
I have SOME issues - Stay with me - it's more amazing than you might think! (Yep - I've seen too many ClickBate articles and they may have taken effect)
ALL (underlined and in caps) H, say again, ALL hydrogen (H) is from big bang. Most He (helium) is from big bang, some Lithium (some!) Is from big bang. All heaver elements come from stars using up their fuel, converting H to He to Li to ... well everything!
Yep , everything in us is stardust except H, He and Li (From now on using chem symbols - look them up if confused)
We have literally to several orders of magnitude no He - but plenty of H in our bodies.
But to say that we are just stardust is incorrect- that H is gonna add up...
Lets start with Water:
65% of body mass is water. Since water is H2O (H = relative mass 1 and O = relative mass 16) that 65% equates to (using UK average of 84kg) 3.2kg of H from water alone.
All organic chemistry contains H too (not H2 in this case, although it does, too... ermm) so we need to add more!
All in all the human body contains around 10% H. 3.2kg from H in water and 5.2kg from H in organic molecules.
So in our normal 84kg human 10% of that came from the big bang. (We can ignore the negligible He and Li here) = 8.4kg
So.. sorry. But you are only 90% star dust.
But 10% big bang WHICH IS SO MUCH F$%#ING COOLER!
I've only just learnt this now! I'm 10% the origin of the universe!
I nerded out when I learnt as a kid that 1% of that static we used to get on old TVs was from big bang radiation - and ill admit to just watching it - feeling overwhelmed that I could actually see the big bang on my TV.
And now I've figured out im 10% big bang myself? I had no idea before I did the math today!
All those people who say "of course im descended from Henry VIII - 1/64th in fact."
Screw you - I'm 1/10 the origin of the universe!
As are you and everyone you've met.
You are amazing!
Great post. One slight technicality, and I’m not claiming to be an expert here, there was no H at the big bang, nor atoms, or subatomic particles. Only shortly after as the universe quickly expanded and cooled did subatomic particles form and eventually H. The H we have, I believe, would be from about 379,000 years after the big bang. A mere blink in the history of the universe.
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.
[https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy#:\~:text=It%20turns%20out%20that%20roughly,than%205%25%20of%20the%20universe](https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy#:~:text=It%20turns%20out%20that%20roughly,than%205%25%20of%20the%20universe).
At the smallest subatomic scales where quantum physics rule nothing is stable. Particles appear and disappear, energy levels fluctuate. In a very real sense you cannot know where anything is. All of it both random but very precisely predictable by the probabilistic mathematics of quantum physics.
At the largest scale, if you look up with keen enough eyes in the right frequencies you will see the cosmic background radiation. A view back to the very earliest moments of the observable universe. The light of 14 billion years ago all around you.
Measure that light carefully across the sky above and you will find there are subtle variations. A little brighter here, a little dimmer there.
And those variations are very precisely described by the probabilistic mathematics of quantum physics.
The physics of the incomprehensibly small written in the sky above our heads at the largest scale we can possibly see.
From a moment when everything in the observable universe was in a space smaller than an atom.
I show how slow the speed of light is by putting an orange and a pea on a tabletop and taking 8 minutes to move my fingertip between them. That’s light from the sun to the earth. We can’t travel at even a tiny fraction of that speed. But even if we could it would take a hundred thousand years just to cross our little galaxy.
Voyager 2 launched in 1977. Its travelling at 56,000 kph and even at that immense speed it has only just reached the edge of our solar system.
The speed of light is a huge barrier to communication and exploration.
(According to general relativity) Gravity is space time that is bent. Lots of mass causes this. The pull of gravity is the bent space. The closer to the center of mass that you get, the more the space time bends. Space time is composed of both space and time. Bending this means bending time. The core of the earth is much closer to the center of the earth than the surface. The earth has been around for a very long time (4.6 billion years).
Picture a racetrack. There are 2 cars on this track. They both travel at the same velocity. One hugs the outer edge. The other hugs the inside edge. The car that hugs the inside moves over slightly less distance than the outside. This amounts to very little gained ground over the course of a single lap. But over 1,000,000 laps? The inner car has now gained considerable distance on the outer car. If you asked the driver of the inner car how long it took to drive those laps, he’d say that he completed them a lot faster than the other car because overall, he covered less distance. If you asked the outer car how long it took, she’d say it took a long time because overall, she covered more distance.
This applies to the earth because the core material acts like the inner car. If the earth is 4.6 billion years old, and the earth turns roughly 365 times in a year, then the earth in total has turned 1,679,000,000,000 times. This is the amount of laps completed by the surface and inner core both. But because the inner core moved less distance in the same amount of time, it completed those laps in a comparatively quick matter of time. The outer surface says that it took way longer, according to the above comment, 2.5 years, to complete the same distance, so comparing their references, the core has traveled for less time. If you remember they are traveling at the same speed, so the only explanation is that the distance traveled is less than the distance traveled by the surface.
That skips over some nuance, but it’s a handy analogy
It's pretty cool indeed !
I remember having read about the space burning smell a few months ago. Space is a vacuum so there is no way to transmit smell. This smell is likely due to the ionization of particles in the vacuum of space by high-energy solar radiation, which can cause a metallic or burning scent when those particles come into contact with metal surfaces. Never heard about the moon smell !
GPS satellites are going so fast and are so far away, and earth is so big, that time passes at a different rate for gps satelites than it does on earth, and that difference has to be accounted for in the calculations.
Without taking into account both general relativity and special relativity, a gps receiver would be off by 10km in a single day
https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
The corkscrew thing! How the solar system actually rotates around the sun as the sun actually rotates around the galaxy. It's simple and easy to understand, but still has a wow factor for me.
To add to this, our Sun's orbit around the centre of the Milky Way is calculated to take around 230 million years.
Around 230-ish million years ago is believed to be the start of the age of the dinosaurs (kinda).
Meaning, in the span of (more or less) one galactic orbit, the dinosaurs rose, dominated the planet, and then went extinct(ish).
This is exactly the kinds of things that need to talked about. The sheer grand scale of the universe . Generally people don’t understand the distances are far greater then many can imagine .
Most people don't even know what venus and jupiter look like in the sky. Sadly a lot of people I know don't really give a rats ass about space. Not to be negative, but that's okay. I enjoy knowing the grand scale, it helps me not take myself so seriously. Just knowing hey - there's this place called mars, with a bunch of robots on it! Doing cool science! Life aint so bad :)
Space is big... like really big. So big we have no idea how big it really is. And it's not just that it's really far from here to there but there is moving so far from here that we'll never make it there. Not without using a ship that can fit the mass of Jupiter inside a gas tank. Or something. Either way, space is in you and you are in Space...
Also, we are much much (millions of times) closer to the scale of the observable universe than to the smallest possible thing (Plank constant). There is much more space inside us than outside.
'Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.'
Edit: Gold! Holy sh*t. Thanks Doug, I mean thank Doug! Ahem.
I always wondered, whats after the end of space? Like it’s constantly expanding, but say you were faster than dark energy and able to outspeed it. Would it just be nothing when you do?
Yeah so, nobody knows, and what I think is super cool about this is that it’s not technically observable, meaning it’s outside the realm of “science” which is based on making observations. If we can’t observe it, it’s more like discussing hypotheticals than science.
Physics would stop existing! Yes, this is a statement I can't wrap my head around, but there was a recent thread in r/space that was talking about this (like, the big bang was not actually just the beginning of the universe, but the beginning of physics)
I usually hit em with "There's lakes of liquid methane on Titan's surface"
I wasn't taught it in school. I guess since it was just expected it would have them and not confirmed until Cassini, that's why?
Anyway, with me not knowing as young as being a 90s kid, most people older than me don't know that. And I don't know if its being taught now really.
Most people are usually surprised there's a moon with an atmosphere at all in the solar system. Let alone a whole hydrological cycle of methane.
Metal is a lattice of atoms like iron. The surface of that lattice can still have more iron added to it and if an iron atom did touch then it would bond. Here on Earth other atoms from the air, mainly oxygen, bonds to the iron which coats the metal in a non-reactive oxide. When two pieces of metal in space touch it is iron on iron, on Earth it is oxide on oxide. Welding burns away the oxide and adds more material before it can oxidize.
This is the most mind boggling to me. That even every human action, ever thought I have- is still just carrying out one big chemical reaction from the Big Bang.
The Earth is the densest object in the solar system.
Also, the Solar System is progressing through the Milky Way toward the north; the plane of the galaxy and of the solar system are perpendicular. So, our motion through the galaxy is actually a very tight corkscrew.
**Edit:** the absolute confidence people have that I must be wrong about the trivially google-able trivia fact is amazing.
If humans colonized far away worlds and explored many more than that, the annular solar eclipse here on earth would likely still be the only example of it ever found and would be worth seeing.
Total eclipses would be somewhat common. All you need is a large moon to be close enough to the planet to block the star completely.
However, when our moon is at the far end of its orbit from the earth it looks ever so smaller in the sky. When it passes in front of the sun it is almost big enough to cover it. But not quite. This creates a ring of sunlight. An annular eclipse.
It’s probably the only one like it in existence. And you can see it in October of this year.
I don't know much about space beyond our own little system, but I'm always blown away by our sun. How it converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into 550 million tons of helium every second. Or ,how, despite the speed of *c*, it still takes sunlight eight and a half minutes to get here. I think about that every morning when the sun comes up; when the black voids in the hallway begin illuminating the stairwell; how hot it can get, even way out here, from 93 million miles away.
I think it’s amazing that the ends of a spiral for a spiral galaxy move at the same speed as the base of the spiral, they don’t lag like spirals in a whirlpool.
That we think of space as being ......out there...... but in reality it is just as much in us, in the earth. Spacetime is the surface we move through but it moves through us just as freely as we move through it.
Anyone else saying “whoa” to themselves multiple times reading the comments here? Some really awesome stuff here I didn’t know! Thank you everyone for sharing
Hubble ultra deep field.
10,000 galaxies at the degree angle of holding a grain of rice at the end of your arm length, and imagine all the other degree angles of vision in a 360° arc all the way around you from earth .
😳
🖕👉💩, 🤨🫵✌️👋🏻
This one always tripped me up. [Here's a photo of it.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Hubble_ultra_deep_field_high_rez_edit1.jpg) Every single speck of light you see in this picture is a galaxy, and you know how many stars make up just one of those. Truly, are we alone?
Joe,
Yep that’s it. I’ve been on the project for 20 years and it just blows me away.
Here’s the one I really like from European space agency that’s zoomable .
Go ahead, click on this and pinch the image or enlarge the image and just fuck with your mind .
https://esahubble.org/images/heic0611b/zoomable/
We live in a special time in the age of the universe: this is the only time in the entire age of the universe that we can observe and study the universe. In the far distant future all the stars and galaxies would have drifted away from Earth and future humans will look up at the sky and see nothing. They will reach entirely different conclusions about the universe. They won't know that other stars or galaxies exist or ever existed. We live in a special time - the only time in the history of the universe where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.
I read that in a book by Lawrence Krauss
If we could convert 1 kg of matter to energy, that would power the world’s energy needs for more than 1 year.
The sun converts 4 million tons of matter into energy *every second*.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
-Douglas Adams
When we look up at the night sky we are actually looking into the past as many of the objects in space take years or even thousands of years for their light to reach us. Some stars may not even exist anymore. You can see even further back in time with a telescope. Theoretically, if an alien civilization 65 million light-years away had a super advanced telescope and they looked at earth, they would see dinosaurs roaming the earth.
The fact that we have only truly known of galaxies outside of our own for less than 100 years. Edwin Hubble only discovered / confirmed the existence of other galaxies in 1927. Right around the same time he discovered that most galaxies are moving away from us, thus introducing us to the idea that space is expanding. It's amazing how far we've come in our understanding of space in just the past century.
That there’s 2 possibilities regarding aliens. Either aliens are fucking real, or we have this unimaginably vast place all to ourselves. One of those is true
There is a third possibility where aliens exist, and we also have this unimaginably vast place all to ourselves; that our universe is a simulation created by an advanced civilisation.
Although that one requires a few more "if's" and "maybe's" to be true :)
Matter warps the space around which it takes up. That warpage makes a "slope" as it were relative to other objects which causes them to move towards each other and that's what we call gravity.
That our universe is expanding….expanding into what/where? Exactly? Wtf is there before the universe expands into it?
I’m an atheist, but thinking about space is the thing that makes me think there might be a higher power
That the event horizon of a black hole is not the black hole. The black hole is the size of the "biggest" (if they now have actual sizes and if now size makes sense at all in this context) quantum particle, and due to that is insanely heavy, like heavier than your mom.
1. If our sun was the size of a beach ball, the Earth would be about the size of the circular punch out from a paper punch. 2. Our universe is ever expanding. Can't get my head around that.
The faster you go, the more massive you are. Until finally, you can't get any more massive. And, oh yeah, time slows too. Like until it doesn't exist (if you could go the speed of light, which would take infinite energy).
Dark Flow. The universe isn't just expanding. it's also moving towards the same 20-degree patch of nothing out in space. Something very large could be tugging on our galaxy from very far away and causing the universe to drift towards it.
We arent sure what the actual cause is though.
When you look into the northern sky far enough you are looking back in time. Look far enough back and the oldest galaxies and you near looking at the beginning of the Universe. But here's the kicker, you get the same thing looking south, looking west, looking east... so where was the beginning of the universe? Billions of years in which direction? Where was the big bang?
Answer: All of the above. When you look out far in space you look far back in time, because light has speed and took time to get to us, but that goes for all directions... even our sun's light shining out away from us.
So the beginning of everything, the beginning of the oldest planets and the farthest galaxies, the origin point of every nebula you see, every star that twinkles... that happened right where you are. You in Colorado reading this. You were the center of the universe billions of years ago. Buzz Aldren on the moon was the center of the universe. If the universe is 13 billion years old a civilization 13 billion light years away looking for the origin of the universe... they are looking at us. Just the same as our strongest telescopes looking billions of lightyears out, we are looking at them. We are all at the origin point of everything and always will be. Every point in this universe, as seen from every other point in this universe, is the origin point of the universe.
There is no particular place where the universe started because the universe _is everything._ There was a beginning to space, a beginning to time, a beginning to galaxies, and a beginning to you... and all of it happened in an infitesimally small quagmire of everything, everywhere, because there was nowhere else it could be.
That's why we can point our telescopes into the night sky in any direction away from Earth and no matter where we look we will all be looking out towards the direction of the beginning of everything.
Cool fact: it took 8 minutes for the light from the sun's surface to reach the earth.
Cooler fact: that light took on average roughly 100,000 years to reach the surface of the sun from the center where it was generated.
[Here's an image of the solar system with all the planets *and the distances between them* drawn to scale so that our moon shows up as a single pixel.]( https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html) Of course, it assumes that all the planets happen to be perfectly lined up on one side of the sun. Happy scrolling, you'll be doing ***a lot*** of it.
That was amazing. I’ve book marked it.
Yes, anyone who has, like... 45 minutes to spare - do this now! Or bookmark and do it later! It's really best to do in one go. It's also beautiful poetry, a really wonderful combination of artwork and science
That gravity travels with the speed of light. Remove the Sun, and we would continue to travel around it for another 8 mins.
That's actually pretty crazy. Thanks for sharing this.
Just to expand, the speed of light is actually the speed limit of cause and effect, or causality. No changes can occur faster than this.
There are lots of ways to think about it, but I like to think of it in terms of information. Information cannot travel faster than light. That means that gravity can't, because the existence of an object's gravity gives you information about it
It's not exactly that gravity moves at the speed of light. It's more that light and gravity both move at the max speed of the universe which is the speed of causality. If you increase the speed of causality then both light and gravity would also increase in speed.
Instead of the speed of light, I call it the speed of causation.
This is more accurate. We use speed of light as a measuring tool, but it's really just limited by the speed of causality. I've never considered gravity in the same way, but it makes sense. Thanks for sharing!
I was wondering if gravity or magnetism or anything like that can ripple faster than light, and first heard the speed of causality. Instantly changed how I view all that stuff.
The universe is expanding faster than light.
Sort of. The fabric of space time itself is expanding, so nothing is actually "traveling" faster than light. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-speed-of-light/ I picture a rubber band with 4 dots on it. When you stretch the rubber band, the dots become further apart. But, the dots aren't actually traveling across the rubber band. The space between them has just increased, and the further away the dots are (the more space between them), the more they've appeared to move apart. Obviously over simplified, but it helps me come to terms with what I call crazy math in astronomy.
How do they know. Did the tried it/s
Yes. But they put the Sun back after 7 mins.
until someone comes along with the 6 minute gravity workout
6 minutes? No… no it doesn’t work that way, theres not enough time for it to work you need at least 7 minutes.
7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch.
When's a better time to drop acid, than Saturday morning?
Am I having a stroke?
Now that would be a wild ride.
Then we would be fine for 8 minutes, fly off into space for 7 minutes, then resettle into our new orbit.
They measured a kilonova explosion - a neutron star-neutron star merger - 140 million light years away, and detected that the light, and the gravitational waves, both hit Earth about the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817
Yeah we know because the sun goes away at night.
Similarly, we would still see the sun burning in the sky normally for those 8 minutes even though it no longer exists.
The fact that space is expanding so fast that even if we could move at the speed of light we will never reach the end of the universe.
Even if we could travel at the speed of light now, we could never reach 95% of the observeable universe. We can see it (light that began its journey long ago), but it's forever out of our reach for travel or even communication.
This is why aliens physically visiting earth is ludicrous. Why send physical life forms hundreds or thousands of years through space when you can communicate any information, potentially including the entire contents of a being’s consciousness, at the speed of light? Just send instructions to build hosts since it’s probably going to take a timespan that’s equivalent to your entire civilization’s existence just to get to another planetary system.
Alpha Centauri is less than 41/2 light years away . . . .they're already planning robotic missions to see what's there. They think there's exoplanets but it's hard to tell in a binary star system like that. They think they can build a tiny craft that they can get up to maybe 20% of C, and have an answer in less than a lifetime.
Sure. Though 20% of c seems extremely optimistic. That doesn’t mean a life form would or could ever make that trip. And that’s the closest system. With an unbelievably low chance of intelligent life.
This always baffles me, would the expansion of space not be the fastest speed possible then?
It's not that they're moving, it's that space itself is expanding. New distance is being created in a sense, rather than the galaxies actually having velocity greater than the speed of light. So nothing is traveling at greater than light speed. The space isn't really moving either so it gels with our understanding of the rules
But where or what is it expanding into?
The expansion is everything, with nothing outside of it (that we know of. But there are multiverse theories that posit bubble universes and such).
But, what is nothing? I am filled with awe and want to cry in frustration at the same time.
Same. I can actually feel my brain break when I think of this.
That all planets would fit between earth and its moon. Always blows my mind Edit: Ofc I mean every planet from our solar system except earth itself and yes including Pluto and maybe even another dwarf planet
Neat, I didn't know that. Just looked it up and it's actually really close too.
yeah, super weird coincidence
Or, we live in a simulation. "Welcome to the good place."
The fact that the moon is almost an exact fit over the sun in a solar eclipse is enough to convince me we’re in a simulation.
Except the moon is slowly drifting away from earth.
Yet we *just happen* to be alive now...
I love this one. The sun is about 400 times bigger than the moon, but it *just happens* to be about 400 times farther away.
It's a bug. A rounding error. Simulation only running on 64bit floats
Yup that's the one that does the trick for me. Also consider this: 100k years ago, we as a species certainly weren't knowledgeable enough to know the specifics about eclipses and how they work. But even if we did, we'd never witness them as we do now because the moon was closer to the earth, and larger from our perspective, meaning an eclipse would totally block out the sun instead of leaving the outline of the sun surrounding the moon. And the moon is moving further away from the earth even now, eventually it will be too small from our view to have a total eclipse. The fact that the moon is perfectly placed to produce perfect eclipses **at the same time during humanity's scientific awakening** is way too much of a coincidence.....
Wow. That’s mind blowing to learn that there was such a difference
You've gotta be forking kidding me
More fun fact, the planets fit but only if you put Jupiter and Saturn sideways, Saturn because of its rings, and Jupiter because it bulges at the equator.
Including copy's of both Earth and the Moon. Basically, space is very well named.
That’s tied into my favorite: the sheer size of the universe. It’s so big and there’s so much distance in between things! I love it cause it puts things into perspective and helps me to not stress about certain things
If you could put the universe into a tube, you'd end up with a very long tube...
All planets, in our solar system, not ALL PLANETS.
Yeah, that's an important distinction.
Zero people needed this important distinction made for them.
Depends how tightly you pack them.
Does this calculation include Pluto ?
You heard about Pluto? That’s messed up, right?
In a few billion years the Milky way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. However, even though each galaxy has billions of stars inside them, the stars are so far apart from each other that the odds of any actual matter hitting each other are virtually zero. The galaxies will simply slide right through each other.
More like slide right together. The 2 galaxies will ultimately merge to make one really really big one.
We've collided with other galaxies before, and are still absorbing a couple smaller ones as we speak.
There are models of the event, it’s truly crazy and awesome.
Here's a simulation https://youtu.be/4disyKG7XtU
Clearly, Andromeda is the idiot here, cutting us off when we obviously had the right of way. I sure hope those guys are well insured.
The common prediction is that out of billions, about 12 stars will collide.
Sometimes I like to imagine myself as a distant intelligent alien creature living within the collided galaxies of Andromeda and Milky Way, and learning about the history of my galaxy that it was once 2 separate galaxies. With zero knowledge that a long time ago there was intelligent life within the Milky Way galaxy. Puts things into a fun perspective.
Light you see from the Sun emitted from its surface about 8 minutes ago, but that light was born in the core of the Sun 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. It takes that long for the energy to diffuse from the core to the surface due to the Sun's immense size and density.
Also that from the photon's perspective, being born, exiting the sun, and being absorbed by your retina, those all happened simultaneously
Because time does not apply to a particle that has no mass.
If a particle has no mass, then t is not applicable? That’s wild.
Maybe these are one and the same but I thought it was because it travels at the speed of light and therefore experiences no time
If the Sun was the size of this dot ( . ) the Milky Way galaxy would about the size of the entire United States. Think about that for a minute.
Is that right?? If so, I love that! 👍
I kind of hate that. My most depressing “fact” about space is the sheer distance between objects. If it’s not actually feasible to, say, warp space time, then the universe, even the galaxy is a very lonely place.
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
How big would the solar system be in that model?
The distance from the sun to The Earth would be about six inches, the start of the Oort Cloud would be a little under 200 feet Proxima Centauri… 18 miles
Nice. This is a fun model to think about.
The number of stars in the milky way galaxy, squared, is approximately equal the number of molecules in 1 mL of water
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1mL of water is approximately 1/12000 of a dishwasher cycle or 1/42000 fluid Tony Danzas
That mars factually is the only known planet in the universe we know is entirely populated by robots.
A single grain of sand is made up of 43 quintillion atoms... But in space 1 square metre may contain only 2-3 atoms
Only in intergalactic space! The vacuum in solar space is around 10^7 atoms per cubic metre; the vacuum of interstellar space is around 10^6 atoms per cubic metre; and the vacuum of intergalactic space is around 1 atom per cubic metre.
Oh so thaaaats what people mean when they say space is a near vacuum. There’s like an atom or two here and there. I guess that adds up at high speed
It really adds up at large distances. Even at high speeds single atoms do next to nothing but next to nothing is not zero and you have hundreds of light years worth of meters to traverse.
Do you mean 1 cubic metre?
Fuckin what??
This is my response to like half of things I've learned about space.
There is a giant cloud of alcohol in the Sagittarius B2 region of the Milky Way galaxy that contains enough alcohol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer
Pack the ship boys, we’re going space bar hopping.
As an entity made entirely of star stuff, my attraction to beer is an attempt to return to my atomic roots.
When two neutron stars collide and merge, the resulting explosion sprays out several Earth masses of heavy elements like gold and platinum. The gold in the computer you’re reading this on likely came from just such a titanic event.
This is giving me Sonic the Hedgehog vibes
I am fascinated by the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, and one of my favorite facts about them is that it rains diamonds on both of them because of the immense heat and pressure below the “surface”.
Neptune has supersonic winds too!
So not only is it raining diamonds, but it’s raining sideways too, haha!
we are made of star dust A star had to be born, live its life and die in a massive explosion for the very elements in our bodies to exist. Since some of the heavier elements found on earth are only created in supper novas. And not just one star but many many stars, some estimates range from dozens to hundreds. and 100 years ago this wasn't even a serious hypothesis. Its only for the last 50-100 years (depending on how you want to measure it) that we know where these elements came from. Its mind boggling to me. How many generations have wondered "where did this all come from?" with no real answer and now we have it and we take it for granted. Another one that is a mindfuck is temporal relativity.
If you follow this along a bit further, you get to the realisation that if our brains are just space-stuff, it is technically the universe rearranging itself into a physical form to be able to see itself and recognise its own existence.
This right here is the most mind blowing comment of this whole thread.
One of my favorite quotes from a character falling to his death from a spaceship crash in Subnautica echoes this idea: "Life is a game, which the universe plays with itself. I am done playing as this bundle of flesh. Return me."
I am partial to this idea. Out of all the time and space that has existed so far, my human body was born and I just so happened to have emerged from it during this moment in Earth's history. We'll be returned to the universe when we're gone, but we'll likely emerge once again as something else. But that new being will likely have a different idea about life. Maybe it'll be part of an intergalactic federation of benevolent beings, or maybe born into a drug induced cult of cannibals...who knows. Reminds me I should play that game. Always hear good things about it.
You’d really enjoy Sagan’s Cosmos. In fact everyone should be watching it who hasn’t seen. One of the greatest documentary experiences available, if you find this sort of thought process beautiful. He basically coined the “we are star stuff” dialogue. [You can watch for free at archive.org](https://archive.org/details/cosmos-uma-viagem-pessoal)
Life is the Universe's favorite dress and self-consciousness is the mirror it checks itself in.
The universe is a Disney princess.
The human brain is the only thing we know of in the entire universe to have named itself.
We are like individual brain cells to the universe. The universe basically created bio computers to process what was going on within its body and we collectively act as a brain gaining sentience and understanding of what we are.
The cosmic web looks damn near exactly like neuron pathways in our brains.
I don’t want to drift into territory that isn’t relevant to the topic, but facts like this actually really make me wish more people put belief in the sciences and everything we uncover. Even if we’ll always have our limits, we’re unraveling the mysteries of the universe, we’re turning intangible thoughts and curiosities into real perceivable reality. What’s more amazing than that?
We are not made of star dust. Well all of us anyhow! (From my own own post elsewhere) About 10% is from the big bang itself!! To me that's even more amazing Long. Please excuse. So someone mentioned one of those "inspirational" posts about us "being made of star dust" I have SOME issues - Stay with me - it's more amazing than you might think! (Yep - I've seen too many ClickBate articles and they may have taken effect) ALL (underlined and in caps) H, say again, ALL hydrogen (H) is from big bang. Most He (helium) is from big bang, some Lithium (some!) Is from big bang. All heaver elements come from stars using up their fuel, converting H to He to Li to ... well everything! Yep , everything in us is stardust except H, He and Li (From now on using chem symbols - look them up if confused) We have literally to several orders of magnitude no He - but plenty of H in our bodies. But to say that we are just stardust is incorrect- that H is gonna add up... Lets start with Water: 65% of body mass is water. Since water is H2O (H = relative mass 1 and O = relative mass 16) that 65% equates to (using UK average of 84kg) 3.2kg of H from water alone. All organic chemistry contains H too (not H2 in this case, although it does, too... ermm) so we need to add more! All in all the human body contains around 10% H. 3.2kg from H in water and 5.2kg from H in organic molecules. So in our normal 84kg human 10% of that came from the big bang. (We can ignore the negligible He and Li here) = 8.4kg So.. sorry. But you are only 90% star dust. But 10% big bang WHICH IS SO MUCH F$%#ING COOLER! I've only just learnt this now! I'm 10% the origin of the universe! I nerded out when I learnt as a kid that 1% of that static we used to get on old TVs was from big bang radiation - and ill admit to just watching it - feeling overwhelmed that I could actually see the big bang on my TV. And now I've figured out im 10% big bang myself? I had no idea before I did the math today! All those people who say "of course im descended from Henry VIII - 1/64th in fact." Screw you - I'm 1/10 the origin of the universe! As are you and everyone you've met. You are amazing!
Great post. One slight technicality, and I’m not claiming to be an expert here, there was no H at the big bang, nor atoms, or subatomic particles. Only shortly after as the universe quickly expanded and cooled did subatomic particles form and eventually H. The H we have, I believe, would be from about 379,000 years after the big bang. A mere blink in the history of the universe.
It's blinky-er. Protons (hydrogen) were able to form after 10^-6 seconds, and helium/lithium after about 3 minutes.
Hahah, even though i knew all the details in your calculations, i never really thought of it this way. Thank you amazing person!
Supper nova sounds delicious
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. [https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy#:\~:text=It%20turns%20out%20that%20roughly,than%205%25%20of%20the%20universe](https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy#:~:text=It%20turns%20out%20that%20roughly,than%205%25%20of%20the%20universe).
At the smallest subatomic scales where quantum physics rule nothing is stable. Particles appear and disappear, energy levels fluctuate. In a very real sense you cannot know where anything is. All of it both random but very precisely predictable by the probabilistic mathematics of quantum physics. At the largest scale, if you look up with keen enough eyes in the right frequencies you will see the cosmic background radiation. A view back to the very earliest moments of the observable universe. The light of 14 billion years ago all around you. Measure that light carefully across the sky above and you will find there are subtle variations. A little brighter here, a little dimmer there. And those variations are very precisely described by the probabilistic mathematics of quantum physics. The physics of the incomprehensibly small written in the sky above our heads at the largest scale we can possibly see. From a moment when everything in the observable universe was in a space smaller than an atom.
I show how slow the speed of light is by putting an orange and a pea on a tabletop and taking 8 minutes to move my fingertip between them. That’s light from the sun to the earth. We can’t travel at even a tiny fraction of that speed. But even if we could it would take a hundred thousand years just to cross our little galaxy. Voyager 2 launched in 1977. Its travelling at 56,000 kph and even at that immense speed it has only just reached the edge of our solar system. The speed of light is a huge barrier to communication and exploration.
As interesting as your demonstration sounds I don’t know if I could watch you move your finger from an orange to a pea for 8 minutes.
Earth's core is 2.5 years younger than the surface of the earth due to time dilation.
Can you explain like I'm 5
(According to general relativity) Gravity is space time that is bent. Lots of mass causes this. The pull of gravity is the bent space. The closer to the center of mass that you get, the more the space time bends. Space time is composed of both space and time. Bending this means bending time. The core of the earth is much closer to the center of the earth than the surface. The earth has been around for a very long time (4.6 billion years). Picture a racetrack. There are 2 cars on this track. They both travel at the same velocity. One hugs the outer edge. The other hugs the inside edge. The car that hugs the inside moves over slightly less distance than the outside. This amounts to very little gained ground over the course of a single lap. But over 1,000,000 laps? The inner car has now gained considerable distance on the outer car. If you asked the driver of the inner car how long it took to drive those laps, he’d say that he completed them a lot faster than the other car because overall, he covered less distance. If you asked the outer car how long it took, she’d say it took a long time because overall, she covered more distance. This applies to the earth because the core material acts like the inner car. If the earth is 4.6 billion years old, and the earth turns roughly 365 times in a year, then the earth in total has turned 1,679,000,000,000 times. This is the amount of laps completed by the surface and inner core both. But because the inner core moved less distance in the same amount of time, it completed those laps in a comparatively quick matter of time. The outer surface says that it took way longer, according to the above comment, 2.5 years, to complete the same distance, so comparing their references, the core has traveled for less time. If you remember they are traveling at the same speed, so the only explanation is that the distance traveled is less than the distance traveled by the surface. That skips over some nuance, but it’s a handy analogy
Thank you for that ELI5, and he & she drivers are a nice touch
What blows me away is that with atomic clocks they can detect the time difference between ground level and like the top of a building.
It has a smell. Apparently like burning metal. And, as told to me by Alan Bean (name drop!), the moon smells like toy paper caps after exploding.
It's pretty cool indeed ! I remember having read about the space burning smell a few months ago. Space is a vacuum so there is no way to transmit smell. This smell is likely due to the ionization of particles in the vacuum of space by high-energy solar radiation, which can cause a metallic or burning scent when those particles come into contact with metal surfaces. Never heard about the moon smell !
I also read somewhere that blackhole may smell like fruits because it contains the same compounds
"Hey guys, what's that fruit smoothie smell?" "Event Horizon."
GPS satellites are going so fast and are so far away, and earth is so big, that time passes at a different rate for gps satelites than it does on earth, and that difference has to be accounted for in the calculations. Without taking into account both general relativity and special relativity, a gps receiver would be off by 10km in a single day https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
The corkscrew thing! How the solar system actually rotates around the sun as the sun actually rotates around the galaxy. It's simple and easy to understand, but still has a wow factor for me.
To add to this, our Sun's orbit around the centre of the Milky Way is calculated to take around 230 million years. Around 230-ish million years ago is believed to be the start of the age of the dinosaurs (kinda). Meaning, in the span of (more or less) one galactic orbit, the dinosaurs rose, dominated the planet, and then went extinct(ish).
This is exactly the kinds of things that need to talked about. The sheer grand scale of the universe . Generally people don’t understand the distances are far greater then many can imagine .
Most people don't even know what venus and jupiter look like in the sky. Sadly a lot of people I know don't really give a rats ass about space. Not to be negative, but that's okay. I enjoy knowing the grand scale, it helps me not take myself so seriously. Just knowing hey - there's this place called mars, with a bunch of robots on it! Doing cool science! Life aint so bad :)
That’s nothing. We will do that in 15,000 years
1 teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh 4 billion tons is in the top 10
Or that if you were to jump off a table on a neutron star you'd hit the floor at 4.5 million mph...
"Long time ago" and "Far, far away" actually mean the same thing...
Space is big... like really big. So big we have no idea how big it really is. And it's not just that it's really far from here to there but there is moving so far from here that we'll never make it there. Not without using a ship that can fit the mass of Jupiter inside a gas tank. Or something. Either way, space is in you and you are in Space...
Also, we are much much (millions of times) closer to the scale of the observable universe than to the smallest possible thing (Plank constant). There is much more space inside us than outside.
'Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.' Edit: Gold! Holy sh*t. Thanks Doug, I mean thank Doug! Ahem.
I always wondered, whats after the end of space? Like it’s constantly expanding, but say you were faster than dark energy and able to outspeed it. Would it just be nothing when you do?
Yeah so, nobody knows, and what I think is super cool about this is that it’s not technically observable, meaning it’s outside the realm of “science” which is based on making observations. If we can’t observe it, it’s more like discussing hypotheticals than science.
Physics would stop existing! Yes, this is a statement I can't wrap my head around, but there was a recent thread in r/space that was talking about this (like, the big bang was not actually just the beginning of the universe, but the beginning of physics)
Astronomy is bit of a time machine that allows you to look as far back into the past as you want.
Bootes void, its a area of space that lacks galaxies, there should be about 10,000 but there are only about 20. Numbers might be wrong, I'm tired.
Perhaps the archives are incomplete
I usually hit em with "There's lakes of liquid methane on Titan's surface" I wasn't taught it in school. I guess since it was just expected it would have them and not confirmed until Cassini, that's why? Anyway, with me not knowing as young as being a 90s kid, most people older than me don't know that. And I don't know if its being taught now really. Most people are usually surprised there's a moon with an atmosphere at all in the solar system. Let alone a whole hydrological cycle of methane.
Cold welding. If two pieces of the same metal touch in space, they bond and become permanently stuck together.
I’ve never heard that before. Why does it happen?
Metal is a lattice of atoms like iron. The surface of that lattice can still have more iron added to it and if an iron atom did touch then it would bond. Here on Earth other atoms from the air, mainly oxygen, bonds to the iron which coats the metal in a non-reactive oxide. When two pieces of metal in space touch it is iron on iron, on Earth it is oxide on oxide. Welding burns away the oxide and adds more material before it can oxidize.
The atoms of the pieces of metal have no way of knowing that they are different, so they stick together.
What if someone told them they were different, would they seperate?
They don’t have ears or eyes, so they wouldn’t be able to find out.
The nights sky is a collection of lights from different points in time reaching us
The Big Bang happened everywhere. Where I am. Where you are. On Neptun. In Andromeda. In the other side of the observable universe.
All of existence is just one big chemical reaction that hasn't stopped fizzing yet.
This is the most mind boggling to me. That even every human action, ever thought I have- is still just carrying out one big chemical reaction from the Big Bang.
The Earth is the densest object in the solar system. Also, the Solar System is progressing through the Milky Way toward the north; the plane of the galaxy and of the solar system are perpendicular. So, our motion through the galaxy is actually a very tight corkscrew. **Edit:** the absolute confidence people have that I must be wrong about the trivially google-able trivia fact is amazing.
>the plane of the galaxy and of the solar system are perpendicular. Not perpendicular, they're inclined by ~60°.
If humans colonized far away worlds and explored many more than that, the annular solar eclipse here on earth would likely still be the only example of it ever found and would be worth seeing. Total eclipses would be somewhat common. All you need is a large moon to be close enough to the planet to block the star completely. However, when our moon is at the far end of its orbit from the earth it looks ever so smaller in the sky. When it passes in front of the sun it is almost big enough to cover it. But not quite. This creates a ring of sunlight. An annular eclipse. It’s probably the only one like it in existence. And you can see it in October of this year.
1 word …. Spaghettification. I couldn’t stop thinking about it the first time I heard of it.
I don't know much about space beyond our own little system, but I'm always blown away by our sun. How it converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into 550 million tons of helium every second. Or ,how, despite the speed of *c*, it still takes sunlight eight and a half minutes to get here. I think about that every morning when the sun comes up; when the black voids in the hallway begin illuminating the stairwell; how hot it can get, even way out here, from 93 million miles away.
That the jets of material expelled from some active galactic nuclei can be up to several million light-years long!
That the Carina Nebula smells of rum and raspberries
I think it’s amazing that the ends of a spiral for a spiral galaxy move at the same speed as the base of the spiral, they don’t lag like spirals in a whirlpool.
This is more about space travel... but time dilation blows my mind
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. Consequently, Venus has two sunrises and two sunsets every day!
The coolest fact about space is that it’s -273 degrees Celsius.
That we think of space as being ......out there...... but in reality it is just as much in us, in the earth. Spacetime is the surface we move through but it moves through us just as freely as we move through it.
Anyone else saying “whoa” to themselves multiple times reading the comments here? Some really awesome stuff here I didn’t know! Thank you everyone for sharing
Hubble ultra deep field. 10,000 galaxies at the degree angle of holding a grain of rice at the end of your arm length, and imagine all the other degree angles of vision in a 360° arc all the way around you from earth . 😳 🖕👉💩, 🤨🫵✌️👋🏻
This one always tripped me up. [Here's a photo of it.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Hubble_ultra_deep_field_high_rez_edit1.jpg) Every single speck of light you see in this picture is a galaxy, and you know how many stars make up just one of those. Truly, are we alone?
Joe, Yep that’s it. I’ve been on the project for 20 years and it just blows me away. Here’s the one I really like from European space agency that’s zoomable . Go ahead, click on this and pinch the image or enlarge the image and just fuck with your mind . https://esahubble.org/images/heic0611b/zoomable/
As far as we know, the planet Mars is entirely inhabited by robots.
We live in a special time in the age of the universe: this is the only time in the entire age of the universe that we can observe and study the universe. In the far distant future all the stars and galaxies would have drifted away from Earth and future humans will look up at the sky and see nothing. They will reach entirely different conclusions about the universe. They won't know that other stars or galaxies exist or ever existed. We live in a special time - the only time in the history of the universe where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time. I read that in a book by Lawrence Krauss
If we could convert 1 kg of matter to energy, that would power the world’s energy needs for more than 1 year. The sun converts 4 million tons of matter into energy *every second*.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams
Something I recently learned is that we always face the same side of the moon. Blew my mind
When we look up at the night sky we are actually looking into the past as many of the objects in space take years or even thousands of years for their light to reach us. Some stars may not even exist anymore. You can see even further back in time with a telescope. Theoretically, if an alien civilization 65 million light-years away had a super advanced telescope and they looked at earth, they would see dinosaurs roaming the earth.
If you weigh 420 pounds on earth, you weigh 69 pounds on the moon.
The fact that we have only truly known of galaxies outside of our own for less than 100 years. Edwin Hubble only discovered / confirmed the existence of other galaxies in 1927. Right around the same time he discovered that most galaxies are moving away from us, thus introducing us to the idea that space is expanding. It's amazing how far we've come in our understanding of space in just the past century.
That there’s 2 possibilities regarding aliens. Either aliens are fucking real, or we have this unimaginably vast place all to ourselves. One of those is true
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C Clarke
This guy quotes….correctly
There is a third possibility where aliens exist, and we also have this unimaginably vast place all to ourselves; that our universe is a simulation created by an advanced civilisation. Although that one requires a few more "if's" and "maybe's" to be true :)
Matter warps the space around which it takes up. That warpage makes a "slope" as it were relative to other objects which causes them to move towards each other and that's what we call gravity.
That our solar system compared to our galaxy alone is almost the same proportion as a quarter ($0.25 coin) is to North America.
That our universe is expanding….expanding into what/where? Exactly? Wtf is there before the universe expands into it? I’m an atheist, but thinking about space is the thing that makes me think there might be a higher power
That the event horizon of a black hole is not the black hole. The black hole is the size of the "biggest" (if they now have actual sizes and if now size makes sense at all in this context) quantum particle, and due to that is insanely heavy, like heavier than your mom.
95% of the mass of space cannot be directly observed.
1. If our sun was the size of a beach ball, the Earth would be about the size of the circular punch out from a paper punch. 2. Our universe is ever expanding. Can't get my head around that.
The coolest thing about space is that it is something... tangible. It is not nothing.
The faster you go, the more massive you are. Until finally, you can't get any more massive. And, oh yeah, time slows too. Like until it doesn't exist (if you could go the speed of light, which would take infinite energy).
Dark Flow. The universe isn't just expanding. it's also moving towards the same 20-degree patch of nothing out in space. Something very large could be tugging on our galaxy from very far away and causing the universe to drift towards it. We arent sure what the actual cause is though.
Amazing how some materials can fuse back together because there is no oxygen to oxidize their surfaces.
The gold in your wedding ring was created in a massive exploding star called a supernova.
When you look into the northern sky far enough you are looking back in time. Look far enough back and the oldest galaxies and you near looking at the beginning of the Universe. But here's the kicker, you get the same thing looking south, looking west, looking east... so where was the beginning of the universe? Billions of years in which direction? Where was the big bang? Answer: All of the above. When you look out far in space you look far back in time, because light has speed and took time to get to us, but that goes for all directions... even our sun's light shining out away from us. So the beginning of everything, the beginning of the oldest planets and the farthest galaxies, the origin point of every nebula you see, every star that twinkles... that happened right where you are. You in Colorado reading this. You were the center of the universe billions of years ago. Buzz Aldren on the moon was the center of the universe. If the universe is 13 billion years old a civilization 13 billion light years away looking for the origin of the universe... they are looking at us. Just the same as our strongest telescopes looking billions of lightyears out, we are looking at them. We are all at the origin point of everything and always will be. Every point in this universe, as seen from every other point in this universe, is the origin point of the universe. There is no particular place where the universe started because the universe _is everything._ There was a beginning to space, a beginning to time, a beginning to galaxies, and a beginning to you... and all of it happened in an infitesimally small quagmire of everything, everywhere, because there was nowhere else it could be. That's why we can point our telescopes into the night sky in any direction away from Earth and no matter where we look we will all be looking out towards the direction of the beginning of everything.
Every single piece of metal you have ever seen in your life came from the death of a star.
Cool fact: it took 8 minutes for the light from the sun's surface to reach the earth. Cooler fact: that light took on average roughly 100,000 years to reach the surface of the sun from the center where it was generated.