Just been playing around with this for a while...
Mind blowing, if you put the Sun at 1 meter diameter, then Pluto is 4.3 kilotmeters away and 1.6mm across!
No wonder we've only made it to the moon so far...
I love science 
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The solar system is MASSIVE! (science geek content)
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Posted 11 months ago #
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And yet the Solar system is just one of billions of other star systems out there. Many of which are found to have their own planets (I think they've found over 600 other planets now and they're finding a couple a month it seems).
Posted 11 months ago # -
Now look at the distances! At current rocketry speeds about 100,000 yrs to reach a similar planetry system to ours!! Better hope they come to us?
And how about the latest largest hyper star, used to be Canis majoris, they reckon there is one 3.5 million km across!!!
Posted 11 months ago # -
I like the fact that when scaled down you can get a better idea of how big it is.
My example above of the sun being 1 meter across - betelguese, the red giant you can see just above Orion's belt, would be 374 meters in diamter! Just to the nearest star it would be 18000 km's away
And to think some people take a greater interest in astrology than astronomy...
Posted 11 months ago # -
and it only took 6 days to make it all...
Posted 11 months ago # -
There's some good links on this thread if you like that sort of thing.
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/old-film-of-boy-in-boat-that-zooms-out-then-in-help-pleasePosted 11 months ago # -
6 days and 8000yrs ago
Knobs 
Gemina, try going the other way and start with the electron/neucleus orbiting scale before moving on to strange/up quarks, etc. The scale of the big works vice versa too.
Posted 11 months ago # -
There is a scale model on an old railway line near york. Its quite stunning. start off with a sun a couple of m across and down the railway line for km are scale models of he planets in the right relative distances
Posted 11 months ago # -
This image is pretty mind blowing. Especially good if you resize it in PhotoShop (or whatever you use) to be the height of your monitor.
The probability of life inhabited planets is very high. And then it's just 50/50 whether those life forms are more or less advanced than us. Of course, mankind being what it is, we like to think that we are the most advanced.
Posted 11 months ago # -
This image is pretty mind blowing. Especially good if you resize it in PhotoShop (or whatever you use) to be the height of your monitor.
I haven't seen a jpeg load that slowly since my first 28.8k modem!!
Posted 11 months ago # -
Good Star size vid!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q&feature=related
Good end.Posted 11 months ago # -
My 2 top science WOWs are the hubble deep field
http://wesleying.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/HubbleDeepField.800px1.jpg
So thats about 1,2oo galaxies in 1 shot. A galaxy is about 100,000,000,0000 stars. The area of the sky the photo covers is the same as a grain of sand held at arms length, or a 5p piece 75 ft away.
I think the bigest wow is the mole.
You pick up a 12g piece of carbon (a small piece of charcoal). Its made of atomes. Lots. But how many. Well here goes.
Version 1
A mythical beast is asked to move the charcoal. The catch is he uses tweezers and moves 1 atom per second. He's been working non stop for 10,000,000,000 years (about the life of the universe 2 as long as planet Earth has been around). How is doing? Half way? Sadly you can't yet see the pile of atoms he has made, no really. Its about 1/100,000th of a gram
Version 2
You swap every atom in the piece of charcoal for a ping pong ball. Ok thats alot of ping pong balls. Too many to keep in Britain. So we take them to the USA. I'll start be saying the whole USA is covered. Knee deep, shoulder deep, covering the houses and trees? Or maybe they've filled the grand canyon and covered all the mountains? Yes it's all covered. The ping pong balls are 70knm deep
Posted 11 months ago # -
I think this explains it all
www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvkPosted 11 months ago # -
Posted 11 months ago #
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6 days and 8000yrs ago Knobs
I know, knobs. The pop proffessor Brian Cox was on telly the other week, talking quite matter of factly about all the massive number things that took place in the first billionth of a second after the big bang.
At that rate how could anyone imagine that anything would take as long as 6 days to happen. A few minutes is more than enough.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Never mind 6 days, try the planck era at 10 to -43
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv6OtEnIAQk
This one is quite funPosted 11 months ago # -
There's a scale model of the solar system in Helsinki. The Sun is in the Centre, Mercury is a few streets away; Earth is in a suburb somewhere and Pluto is about 30 miles away in the middle of the forest. I never found it, although Jupiter was near my flat
EDIT: not quite that big actually:
http://www.ursa.fi/ursa/aurinkokuntamalli/eng/info-en.html
If you want mind bending, how about this. In that model the sun is 140cm diameter, and Pluto is about 6km or so away. The next nearest star would be 40,000km away, or in other words you could use the same model as for the sun but after having gone all the way around the world!
Posted 11 months ago # -
& who was it who said, 'space is not only queerer than we think, It's queerer than we CAN think'
It gives me a bad head.
Posted 11 months ago # -
It's the not knowing, and worse, the probably never likely to know! How frustrating is that?
Posted 11 months ago # -
It gives me a bad head
Only if you try and comprehend it in normal common sense spatial terms, but that's pointless. Common sense has developed on Earth in human perspective terms.
Maths is your language in this domain.
Posted 11 months ago # -
if that tweeks your twinky check out last week's sky at night on cygnus if it's still on iplayer. nerd-tastic but utterly fabulous
Posted 11 months ago # -
Big Bang Bollocks.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Brain failure due to feeling insignificant. Goes back to book of fairy tales.
Posted 11 months ago # -
This has probably been posted before, but this seems as good a place as any to repost:
Dave
Posted 11 months ago # -
"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..."
Posted 11 months ago # -
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 street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
EDIT .....too slow!
Posted 11 months ago # -
Posted 11 months ago #
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The probability of life inhabited planets is very high. And then it's just 50/50 whether those life forms are more or less advanced than us. Of course, mankind being what it is, we like to think that we are the most advanced.
Even with the possibility of "other" life. What are are the chances they get to us/we get to them given how massive space is!? Even at light speed it'd take an astonishingly long time to cover any meaningful distance (relatively speaking)
Posted 11 months ago # -
And then it's just 50/50 whether those life forms are more or less advanced than us
Not sure to be honest. There's an intrinsic timescale to these things. You need heavy elements, so you have to wait for many stars to form, get old, blow up and newer ones to form. Then you have to wait for their planets to cool and become stable - so many planetary lifecycles will be about the same point.
Of course.. technological development of civilisation will be fairly random I suppose..hmm...
Even at light speed
That's why scifi stories rely on the concept of hyperspace.
Posted 11 months ago # -
The wonders of the solar system spoof Is a bit sweary If your In work.
Posted 11 months ago # -
And to think some people take a greater interest in astrology than astronomy...
In the red corner, Astronomy: as this thread shows it has a tendency to decay into a geeky top-trumps style conversation about how my star's bigger than yours.
In the blue corner, Astrology: sex, death, love and war.
Hard to see why one's consistently more popular, really.
Posted 11 months ago # -
If you're a bit of a geek this book is well worth a read - maths in an interesting and historical way along with a few of those examples that makes you realise that maths is actually very cool.
One of the thngs in there is the Hindu study of very very very large and small numbers, things which make the size of the universe pale into insignificance. They did that as a way not of measuring the almost immeasurable but trying to get a sense of scale, of belonging, of perspective on things, the size of the universe being one of them.
Posted 11 months ago # -
Posted 11 months ago #
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I have two favourite things in the night sky, I love talking to my kids about this stuff.
1. Betelgeuse - in space terms it's REALLY close to us, only about 650 light years. A red giant, it's very obviously orange to the naked eye. The best thing? It's going to explode, probably within the next million years or so and maybe even in our lifetime! We could quite literally wake up tomorrow to two suns! It might have gone bang already, the light just hasnt got here yet.
2. The Andromeda Galaxy - the galactic twin to the Milky Way, you can see the very centre of it with the naked eye. If your eyes were powerful enough it would appear as a huge spiral disc SIX TIMES the diameter of the full moon! Imagine what that would look like, how beautiful it would be? Oh and we are going to crash into it in about 4.5bn years.
Who needs to worry about the mutterings of an Iron Age Middle Eastern desert mystic when you can see this stuff with your own eyes?
Posted 11 months ago # -
so many planetary lifecycles will be about the same point
For values of about equal to +/- hundreds of millions of years, maybe.
Posted 11 months ago #
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