Hubble Ultra Deep Field 3D video

[lucky8]

How can't we share your sense of awe and inadequacy...

...but the irony is that the billion billion other planets about whose existence current science might speculate are likely nowhere near lucky enough to support even the most primitive lifeforms, let alone lifeforms advanced enough to preoccupy themselves with "mindless issues".

you obviously don't get it...

 

[deleted213967]

you obviously don't get it...

Go buy yourself a sense of humor .

 

[Skull Mason]

what is the Death Star Hypothesis?

A lot of astronomy can be learned in a way that is not related to a lot of mathematics or physics. Sometimes just the thoughts of scale and beauty within our Universe are mind boggling and mind blowing enough to make anyone think with a new perception on existence. It is these people who are never able to experience the thoughts about our place in the universe that I feel sorry for, it is like how I feel for someone who has never tripped before; they just won't get it. It is like learning to play the guitar; sometimes it is just more enjoyable to just play as opposed to trying to learn to read music and learn theory and shit like that. Nemesis is one of those thoughts that can segue into other aspects of astronomy without getting bogged down by "physics" and things like that.

Nemesis is a hypothetical red dwarf or brown dwarf star, orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 50,000 to 100,000 AU, somewhat beyond the Oort cloud. This star was originally postulated to exist as part of a hypothesis to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record.

-Nemesis

Basically what happens is every so many millions of years our sister star comes a little too close to the Oort cloud, which is a halo of icy bodies and "dust" as remnants of the creation of our solar system (comets, debris etc, Pluto may just be the biggest body in the Oort Cloud as opposed to a true "planet") that surrounds our Sun and solar system. When this so called Death Star impinges on the outskirts of the Oort Cloud, it's gravitational bump turns the inner solar system into a cosmic shooting gallery.

Just a slight nudge to the gravitational field can send hundreds of icy and or rocky bodies towards the Sun. That is why when you look at all the other rocky planets in our system (the terrestrial inner planets) as well as the moons of the inner and outer planets, all show the scars of countless asteroid and comet impacts. Just as many craters have existed on Earth, only the ocean and other tectonic and erosional forces have wiped them clean or covered them up.

So while Nemesis dances around the Oort Cloud, every 26 millions years or so, extinction events may have occurred here on Earth. The number 50,000 to 100,000 AU; AU stands for Astronomical Unit, which is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, which is 93 million miles (93,000,000). Light travels this distance in 8 minutes; at 186,000 miles per second. That means when you see the sun sitting right about the horizon as it sets, you are actually looking at it's ghost; it has already set.

But these numbers give you an example of how large everything is out there; how incomprehensible it is. I can't do the math for how long it takes the Sun's light to get to Nemesis (if it indeed exists), but the nearest star, Alpha Centauri (which is actually a double or triple star system- most stars have a companion), is a little more than 4 light years away. That means when you see it, the light you see has been traveling for 4 years at 186,000 miles a second. And that is just our nearest neighbor.

Let's put our own solar system to scale. If you were to put a small marble at the goal line of football field, the moon would be a smaller marble a few inches behind it. I believe Mars would be another marble about 20 yards away. Jupiter would be 100 yards after that; about 40 light minutes away. If you want to run to Pluto, between 250 and 408 light minutes away because of it's elliptical orbit, you would have to run another 400 yards or so and place a marble. And if you wanted to get to the nearest star you would have to run about 4 miles away. There are some stars in our galaxy that if you placed them where our sun is it would extend out beyond the orbit of Jupiter. 40 light minutes from it's own center. A star 80 light minutes across? This star is betelgeuse and you can see it in the constellation Orion in the winter, it's the red looking star that is his shoulder.

The size of our solar system, galaxy, and universe are beyond any form of human comprehension, no matter how hard you think about it. Imagine that; a number and size so large, so foreign a thought to our consciousness, that our minds can't even fathom it. There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Think about that number, think through each individual star, even if you group them in thousands; you can't do it. Now know that there are over 100 billion galaxies out there, each with an average of a 100,000,000,000 stars in them.

Look at some of these things out there;

Cat's Eye nebula
Rho Ophiuchus - everything in this picture is a star
Whirlpool Galaxy
Horsehead Nebula
Eagle Nebula - 9.5 light years tall
The Great Orion Nebula - this is the middle star in Orion's sword you can see it with your naked eye, looks like a fuzzy star.

Did any of you catch a glimpse of this in 1997?

 

[D_Kissimmee Coldsore]

Great post Skull. Just scaling things down can make incomprehensible data suddenly understandable, at least to a degree.

I expect that we will soon know if the Nemesis hypothesis has any truth to it or not. It's an interesting hypothesis, however as far as I understand it there isn't exactly very much basis for it. We shall see soon enough. There is plenty of room out there for something to exist there though: File:Oort cloud Sedna orbit.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seeing the Solar system portrayed in that way is amazing. People are (were) told that Pluto was the ninth planet and they imagine, as I once did, an icy world right on the edge of the Solar system. But of course it's a Kuiper Belt object and that places it very much in the local neighbourhood. The hugeness is unbelievable. Yet Voyager 1 may survive long enough to pass out of the heliosphere and so into interstellar space. What an achievement!

And yes, I think Hale-Bopp was probably the first time I really became facinated by space. As a small boy being told that the tail I could see was as long as the distance from the Earth to the Sun absolutely blew my mind. After that I was hooked.

 

[Flashy]

great post Skull...

thanks for the explanation.

i wish that we could have a manned mars mission...i think it would be an incredible event.

it really upsets me how small the NASA budget has become in recent years...it seems like the public at large has less of an appetite for us to pursue something truly incredible and unique then it did during the lunar landing days.

interestingly, since it is based in astronomy, this is one of the funniest spoof articles i have ever read...appropriately, from the Onion....about the Mars Rover...LOL

Mars Rover Beginning To Hate Mars | The Onion - America's Finest News Source