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'Outer Space' is wild and scary
Drew-B
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I could go on for days upon days about our crazy universe. But to keep things relatively brief, lets start with some nice and vague superlatives. I will now ramble on a bit like a child...because that's exactly what space turns me into. A gushing child.
So what's the biggest star we've found? VY Canis Majoris, of course.
Want a massive image to better show the scale? (Seriously, don't click this)
And here's our little earth shown next to our little sun
What about the largest planet? Why it's little ol' HAT-P-1. But get this, it revolves around its star once every 4.5 earth-days. That's crazy!
Crappy scaling image (It's about 1.4x the size of Jupiter. I'm not sure about the validity of this image):
Here's one of those Youtube we've all already seen that shows "Oh look how insignificant we are." But still, I remain pretty mesmerized, myself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FwCMnyWZDg
But this stuff is all so far away, who gives a shit? Well, if you feel that way, and you're tired of hearing about Mercury, Venus and so on, there's always the ~166 GODDAMN MOONS in our own solar system.
~166! Hell, a lot of them are just as interesting, if not more so, than the nine orbiting bodies we've come to know and love.
One of these moons you've probably heard or read about, Jupiter's Io, has over 400 active volcanoes!
Another little factoid about another thing you've probably heard about. The Olympus Mons on Mars, the planet's largest mountain, is 15 miles high! It's our solar system's largest volcano.
You know what else is neat? Neutron stars.
On that note, that should be some stuff to get started. Honestly guys, this stuff is fascinating. Share some stuff 'bout good old outer space. I will read it and enjoy it.
So what's the biggest star we've found? VY Canis Majoris, of course.
Want a massive image to better show the scale? (Seriously, don't click this)
And here's our little earth shown next to our little sun
What about the largest planet? Why it's little ol' HAT-P-1. But get this, it revolves around its star once every 4.5 earth-days. That's crazy!
Crappy scaling image (It's about 1.4x the size of Jupiter. I'm not sure about the validity of this image):
Here's one of those Youtube we've all already seen that shows "Oh look how insignificant we are." But still, I remain pretty mesmerized, myself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FwCMnyWZDg
But this stuff is all so far away, who gives a shit? Well, if you feel that way, and you're tired of hearing about Mercury, Venus and so on, there's always the ~166 GODDAMN MOONS in our own solar system.
~166! Hell, a lot of them are just as interesting, if not more so, than the nine orbiting bodies we've come to know and love.
One of these moons you've probably heard or read about, Jupiter's Io, has over 400 active volcanoes!
Another little factoid about another thing you've probably heard about. The Olympus Mons on Mars, the planet's largest mountain, is 15 miles high! It's our solar system's largest volcano.
You know what else is neat? Neutron stars.
These interesting objects are born from once-large stars that grew to four to eight times the size of our own sun before exploding in catastrophic supernovae. After such an explosion blows a star's outer layers into space, the core remains—but it no longer produces nuclear fusion. With no outward pressure from fusion to counterbalance gravity's inward pull, the star condenses and collapses in upon itself.
Despite their small diameters—about 12.5 miles (20 kilometers)—neutron stars boast nearly 1.5 times the mass of our sun, and are thus incredibly dense. Just a sugar cube of neutron star matter would weigh about one hundred million tons on Earth.
On that note, that should be some stuff to get started. Honestly guys, this stuff is fascinating. Share some stuff 'bout good old outer space. I will read it and enjoy it.
Drew-B on
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Posts
Bad timing
Anyway, like I was telling you, Castor is a sextuple star. The primary system is a binary system made up of two smaller binary systems. And, acting as an eclipsing binary, another binary star system
Six stars!
It'll crash your browser
HUBBLE SITE GALLERY?
DON'T MIND IF I DO:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/
Shit is absolutely crazy. The real kicker is what happens when they approach the point where the light they're reflecting (What allows us to see them) gets to a point where it's unable to escape the pull of the black hole, and you begin to see a ghost image of him/her, even long after they're gone. That, and Spaghettification.
Previous account
Hypothesis: Saturn is actually a giant gun that sucks in matter at the north pole and fires it from the south pole
Or: Saturn is our solar system's jet engine
Gotta Catch 'em All!
I'm gonna be, the very best ...
3DS FC: 4699-5714-8940 Playing Pokemon, add me! Ho, SATAN!
I do the same when I simply think of the fact that there are ~100 billion stars estimated to be in our galaxy alone...then there's the whole hundreds of billions of galaxies thing.
Then I wonder how weird it would be between galaxies. Talk about a void.
Previous account
But who knows! Maybe that's where the space pterodactyls live.
~$
That's just it. Complete emptiness. No stars. No light reflection.
I'm pretty sure you could be standing an inch away from me and I would see pitch black.
Previous account
i am sad that i will never get to see a star explode or a galaxy crash or anything like that
off by 10 years there
I was considering adding italics
There's a reason we say the odds are astronomical
well that's a little close
Which means, when it blows, we won't know about until 4,900 years later.
It's amazing to think that when you look up at a star, and that star is 30 light years away, you're looking at an image of that star from 1979.
Previous account
exciting time
I'll just be here looking at the pretty pictures, maybe reading about some fancy star, and someone links to Wikipedia and I have no choice but to spend the rest of my day there.
The day after the theory is published, we lose an entire generation of astronomers to a near-terminal case of the heebie jeebies.
This also means, if it blows, and a gamma ray burst is heading towards us
We would have 4900 years to evacuate?
just below
only if we magically found out it had blown up through like telepathy or something
but probably we would find out it had blown up 4,900 years after the fact and be gamma rayed to death in the same moment