If the earth was 10cm across, the sun would be 11m across and would be 118m away.

Not so amazing.

However…

The nearest star apart from the sun, at the same scale, would be 31 million metres away. Wow.

GB

i got neomycin

I always thought of the Sun as much bigger than the Earth – learn something new every day…

Kimbers, you can get an ointment that will clear that up. Doesn’t stop the itching, though, I’m afraid.

Allthegear it’s a smidge bigger.

Universe facts are amazing.

AMAZING! I love these kind of facts….

Looks like a bit of a thrashing at the moment!

Some characters tonight!!!!!

the Suns that size and still only 50p got to be a bargain..

OP if you like that sort of stat, try this

http://htwins.net/scale2/

Someone else posted it on here before, but i reckon it’s well worth re-posting.

“Space,” it says, “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….

don’t panic 😆

I won’t, pitduck. I know where my towel is.

The question about Trossach referring to a glen is pretty obscure as it’s not how the word is used now.

They also mentioned this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

There is a knack to UC questions. Particularly the starter ones.

Me too, I love these comparisons.

there used to be a piece on the back of the Orange brochure, that likened the history of time (46 hundred million years) to a 46 year old person:

Planet Earth is 4,600 million years old. We
can liken earth to a person of 46 years of
age. Nothing is known about the first years
of this person’s life… only at the age of 42
did the Earth begin to flower. Dinosaurs and
the great reptiles did not appear until one
year ago when the planet was 45. Mammals
arrived eight months ago and in the middle
of last week man-like apes evolved into apelike
men and at the weekend, the last ice age
enveloped the Earth.

Modern man has been around for four
hours. During the last hour man took to
agriculture. The Industrial Revolution began
a minute ago.

During those sixty seconds of
biological time, modern man has made a
rubbish tip of paradise.’

The metre was originally designated by a Frenchman as being the distance from the equator to the North Pole, divided by 10 million.

I think that’s brilliant.

Since 1983, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1 ? 299,792,458 of a second.

That doesn’t sound quite so “nice” to my mind.

If the world was a village of a 100 people……

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6eTr4ldDYg[/video]

Final tonight – will the incredibly bright Mancunian captain Burke lead his team to triumph over Cambridge?

I have been hooked on this series – questions and characters. How did David Walliams sneak in a few weeks ago?

Maybe somsone can answer this one for me then.

Juniper, Saturn and the like. Planets, but not as we know them. You can’t stand on them. Just a load of crap for the most part.

So why are they called planets? It’s all very well saying Juniper is dead big, but if you could stand on it, how big would it be then? It’s like saying “well my apple is much bigger than yours” after it’s been injected with 10 grams of nitroglycerin and dropped on the floor.

So who wins really? Is it us or the Uranians or Martians?

I hate those Uranians.

if uranus was a gas giant people would post just for a cheap laugh

*sniggers*

Can’t have a gin & tonic without jupiter.

I got Hitler’s painting 🙁

5 questions right in total 🙂

Universe facts can only be measured in “Buses” and Football Pitches 😉

The metre was originally designated by a Frenchman as being the distance from the equator to the North Pole, divided by 10 million.

To be fair, the French were always getting up to stuff like this. Napoleon in particular was very keen on introducing measurements involving 120ths of things and 2 feets of other things.

Mainly because he was completely barking.

Luckily us Brits didn’t bother with that nonsense and employed metric counting measurements at all times.,

So why are they called planets?

Depends how you define planet innit. They are very very heavy, despite not being very dense.

Maximum distance from the sun: 94 million 537 thousand miles

Minimum distance from the sun: 91 million 377 thousand miles

Mean distance from the sun: 92 million 957 thousand and 200 miles

Mean Orbital velocity: 66000 miles per hour

Orbital eccentricity: 0.017

Obliquity of the ecliptic: 23 degrees 27 minutes 8.26 seconds

Length of the tropical year: equinox to equinox 365.24 days

Lenght of the sidereal year: fixed star to fixed star 365.26 days

Length of the mean solar day: 24 hours and 3 minutes and 56.5555 seconds at mean solar time

Length of the mean sidereal day: 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds at mean sederial time

Mass: 6600 million million million tons

Equatorial diameter: 7927 miles

Polar diameter: 7900 miles

Oblateness: one 298th

Density: 5.41

Mean surface gravitational acceleration of the rotating earth: 32.174 feet per second per second

Escape velocity: 7 miles per second

Albedo: 0.39

Thats us.

I’m not an albedo. I’m just blonde and a bit pale.

Fascinating stuff on this thread 🙂

I’d like to meet the guys who came up with the metric system, as it’s a true system of measurement.

Assuming the liquid is water.

1 metre is 100 cm, 1kg is 1000g, 1l is 1000cm3, 1l weighs 1000g and measures 10cm x 10cm x 10cm (or 1dm3 which is 1l). So mass, length and volume are directly linked.
Neat

We now produce 250 times more transistors per year than we do grains of rice.

Love these facts, keep ’em coming!

How far would the pub be?

Luckily us Brits didn’t bother with that nonsense and employed metric counting measurements at all times.,

tongue firmly in cheek?

VY Canis Majoris – the largest know star – around 3 billion Km in diameter.
Or for those of you struggling to viualise a diameter of 3 billion Km, it would take a plane traveling at 900Km/h around 1100 years to fly once round it.

Now that is truly amazing!

Alan Shepard holds the record for the longest golf drive at 2,400ft.

by the way…

He teed off when he was on the moon.

We’re all very proud here in Manchester that our students have been voted ‘least likely to kiss a girl’ 2012.