What if we could make a spaceship that is capable of leaving the solar system at the speed of light? How much time would it take to enter interstellar space?
Our Solar system is big, and vast, despite it being really small compared to our galaxy, not to mention the complete universe. To put this into perspective, you can
Two stars may collide into a stunning “red nova” in 2022 (or a few months earlier, most probably between September 2021 and September 2022), and for a few weeks become one of the brightest objects in Earth’s night sky, scientists predict. When two stars merge, they increase in brightness 10 thousandfold.
Andromeda Galaxy is the farthest object in the sky that we can see with the naked eye. But if you don’t know where to look, you won’t notice it. If it was much brighter, its appearance in the sky would be sensational. The moon is a good reference for what we’d see if our galaxy’s neighbor was much brighter in the image below:
Have you ever wondered how big is the Earth compared to other planets? Or other stars? Or even the Universe itself?
When it comes to big numbers, very big numbers, the human brain is weak. In fact, our brains cannot deal with really large numbers. That’s why when the subject is Earth, planets, Solar System, galaxies, and in general, the Universe, we cannot truly conceptualize the things. A lot of people think we’re “conquering” space (we are far, far away from that – and maybe we never will), or the “aliens” are regularly visiting Earth as if it is just an hour’s drive from there.
In fact, these people don’t truly understand what are they talking about, how big is the universe, how far even the nearest stars are, and how the Earth is a tiny, tiny spot in a vast space we are still striving to understand.
A beautiful video, once again, from Michael Stevens, titled “How Earth Moves”. Michael explains many concepts, including “sub-solar point”, “sidereal day vs solar day”, or “how Earth moves in space” etc, and he is doing it in a very simplified manner. Enjoy!
What if Mars still had liquid water on its surface and a thick atmosphere filled with clouds, like Earth? How would it look like? Software engineer Kevin Gill of JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) wondered this and prepared an image using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, see notes 1) and Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA, see notes 2). The result is stunning!
Gill picked an arbitrary sea level and used GIMP (a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing) to paint the features onto the satellite images using these measurements.
Elon Musk, the founder, CEO, and Lead Designer of the private space travel company SpaceX announced that “they are planning to get humans to Mars in six years”. In order to achieve this goal, Musk revealed the Interplanetary Transport System, which aims to reach Mars with a human crew for the first time in history.
Previously I posted two articles titled “If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A Tediously Accurate Map Of The Solar System“, and “A Scale Model of Solar System Drawn in the Desert and the Result is Stunning“. In these posts, science enthusiasts have shown the scale of the solar system realistically. Since the human brain cannot deal with really large numbers, these articles provide an amazing way to understand how big actually our Solar System is.
Now, I decided to put the Solar System into scale as an infographic. You can see the scale of the Solar System below, the planets’ distances from the Sun, and the first flybys over them. Plus some statistics about the planets and our home planet, the Earth. Planet sizes are not scaled since they’d be too small to be seen at this scale.
On August 24, 2016, a group of scientists led by Dr. Guillem Anglada-Escude at the Queen Mary University of London, announced the discovery of a terrestrial exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the nearest known star to the Sun. Proxima Centauri is a Latin idiom, meaning “nearest (star) of Centaurus” (see notes 1). The new planet is named Proxima Centauri b and it is predicted to be orbiting within the habitable zone!
Earth is a blue marble in space and the water gives our planet its blue color. About 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. There is roughly 326 million cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers) of water on the Earth’s surface. Almost 97% of that water is salty (ocean water). But where did all that water come from?