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space facts?


Tanoshii

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I thought it might be fun to create a thread for interesting facts about space, I'll start!

At the centre of our galaxy theres a super massive black hole thought to be four million times as massive as our sun, its around 28,000 light years away so earth is a safe distance from it.

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The closest galaxy to us is the Andromeda Galaxy (only 2.54 Million light years away) and is one of the few galaxies that can be seen, unaided, from earth. It's expected to collide with the Milkyway galaxy to form a giant elliptical galaxy but that's not going to happen for about another 4.5 billion years (almost as long as there has been life on earth).

 

Space facts!

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Ceres is a dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter, its known as an "embryonic planet" meaning it started to form but never finished, jupiters strong gravity prevented it from becoming a fully formed planet.
Scientists would like to search ceres for signs of life since it has water.

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Spoilers for nihilism? Spoilers for nihilism.

 

Spoiler

Due to the laws of thermodynamics, the net entropy of the universe must always increase. In other words, the temperature of the universe is always working to equalize. Since life is sustained by said increase in entropy, having the universe be a uniform mass of one temperature would be very, very bad; and there's no escaping it. This is known as the Heat Death of the universe. Or, in simplest (and semantically inaccurate) terms: the universe is mortal, and everything's gonna die in a very, very, very, very long time.

 

Also, the sun is pretty close to perfectly average in size for a star. Among other things, this means it isn't even big enough to go super nova at the end of its lifespan.

 

Spaaaaaace!

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The sun being average in size, due to yellow type dwarves and red dwarves being somewhat rather common. The sun is large enough where, in a few billion years it'll expand into a red giant as it starts to exhaust its fuel supplies, and then shed those outer layers as a planetary nebula, leaving the small core of a white dwarf behind. The sun however, despite what some people say does not nearly have enough size or mass to go supernova, where it needs at least 2-3 solar masses (if I remember the numbers right) to hit the Chandreskar limit, which is the bare minimum a star needs to have to possibly go nova.

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If they do indeed exist Quark stars are estimated to be about 16.5km across compared to a Neutron star which is an average of 25km - I have however heard that it could be as small as an apple.

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light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to reach earth but it takes 4 hours to reach neptune 

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Venus once held the ability to sub-stain life and has deep valley and groves on the surface indicating possible bodies of water however something collided with the planet knocking it out of the “habital zone” causing the water to evaporate and for the atmosphere to become mainly carbon dioxide. This causes a greenhouse warming effect that is making the planet interestingly hotter.

 

There is also a lot of evidence that out solar system has an actual 9th planet popularly know as Planet X. There are several dwarf plants and groupings of astroids that orbit our sun in an elliptical obit in that same kind of direction but for this to have been a stable system for so long it’s theorised that a larger body is needed to “Shepard” these, that larger body bring Planet X that it it’s closest would be 80x further from the sun and Earth is. More research or actual visual evidence is needed to confirm this but it looks very likely.

 

A Planet is classified as being a mass that orbits a star, that has enough mass and gravity that it formed into a pretty spherical shape and that it also has enough mass to clear its orbit of debris. Pluto isn’t large enough to have a clear orbit which is why it is classified as a dwarf planet.

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SithAzathoth WinterDragon

I'll become an ambassador with NASA next summer, on a side note when the sun has a mass eruption it takes up to 3 hours for charged particles to reach the planet and the colors we get with auroras varies on the gas the particles go through. 

The Auroral curtain starts from 60 miles above the ground, that is green and the most common color to reds which both green and red are oxygen caused and the blues and purples are nitrogen. 

I can go more into detail with Auroras and say that we're not the only planet in our system that has them. 

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21 minutes ago, K.I.N.G said:

Venus once held the ability to sub-stain life and has deep valley and groves on the surface indicating possible bodies of water however something collided with the planet knocking it out of the “habital zone” causing the water to evaporate and for the atmosphere to become mainly carbon dioxide. This causes a greenhouse warming effect that is making the planet interestingly hotter.

 

There was something I was reading recently that Venus may be in the inner edge of the habitable zone, however since it's magnetic field has died, the sun stripped the good parts of it's atmosphere, and was replaced by gases from volcanic eruptions. Similar thing with Mars, although it's tectonically rather dead, so it's had nothing to replenish it's atmosphere. Mars' atmosphere is so thin that, even though some parts get to a rather comfortable 24 degrees C, that water will boil.

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4 minutes ago, Una Salus Victus said:

Venus may be in the inner edge of the habitable zone, however since it's magnetic field has died, the sun stripped the good parts of it's atmosphere, and was replaced by gases from volcanic eruptions. 

Ah yes that’s it! thought I was missing part of it there lol

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In late October/early November of 2013 there were a number x-class solar flares with the largest flare occoring on November 5th. X-class solar flares are considered the most powerful and potentially deadliest form of solar storms however luckily these flares occurred on the side of the sun facing away from the earth so only temporary radio blackout and a slight change in the earths magnetic field was recorded.

 

In 1989 the Earth wasn’t as lucky as on March 13th, Quebec suffered a 9 hour citywide blackout that was caused by a huge solar flare hitting the earth. The city’s circuit breakers were tripped by the flares effects on the earths magnetic field - it also effected the earths poles allowing the auroras to be seen as far south as Florida and Texas. The particular flare that caused this was a CME or coronal mass ejection that occurred three day prior on March 9th - CMEs are an expulsion of plasma and magnetic field from the suns corona, generally set off by a large solar flare which there was - an x-class solar flare took place on March 6th 1988 staring this whole affect off.

 

 

 

lol feel like I’m just going to end up spamming the thread with the ludicrous amount of random half facts I know.

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Although Earth's atmosphere is mostly protected by our magnetic field, it is still being somewhat, rather slowly being stripped by the solar wind. While we are losing mass each year, some of that does get replenished by meteorites etc.

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This is one of my favourite space photos:

No photo description available.

 

I really like that reverse perspective, Earth is a tiny dot of light in the sky from Saturn rather than the opposite.

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27 minutes ago, Una Salus Victus said:

sounds a bit like a gamma ray burst? i may need to read it again haha but very interesting!

reminds me of this article that popped up on my twitter this morning tho!

 

hubble tracks the life cycle of giant storms on neptune

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A gamma ray burst would travel about the speed of light, so if they can track that speed I'd say not. Just as a rough guess, light from the moon reaches earth in just a fraction over a second, where as this object would take 6 minutes to travel the same distance.

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No worries mate, we're here for the fun of it yeah? :P It's always interesting to hear these sorts of things.

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The outer rims of many spiral galaxies are rotating faster than they should. The visible matter isn't enough to hold them together at this speed. This is the reason why nonbaryonic dark matter was assumed in the first place. This kind of dark matter does not interact with light or anything, it's just heavy.

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the wow! signal was a narrowband radio signal received by ohio state university's big ear radio telescope on 15th aug 1977, it seemed to come from the constellation sagittarius and its origin is currently unknown.
jerry ehman discovered the signal a few days later after reviewing the recorded data, he was so impressed by it that he circled the reading and wrote wow! on the side.

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The cosmic microwave background is the glow left over from 300,000 years after the big bang when the universe finally cooled enough that it could transmit light (plasma is opaque to light).  That is as far back as instruments can see directly, but things that happened earlier cause slight modifications in the brightness of the CMB radiation, and those give hints about what happened much closer to the big bang.  A major goal of observational cosmology is seeing the effects of gravity waves produced by cosmic inflation in the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. 

 

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TheWanderingDuck

Saturn's rings will eventually disappear.

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Our moon is tidally locked to Earth, meaning that it's close enough to be affected by Earth's gravity in such a way where it takes the same amount of time to orbit us as it does to spin. There are several other moons in our solar system that are the same, and if I remember right, Mercury is also tidally locked.

Also, here's a fun one for everyone:

Image may contain: text

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