Space stuff
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Apologies in advance for any existential dread this creates, but here is a to-scale rendering of the solar system if the Moon were 1 pixel: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
If we consider the solar system to include the sun’s gravitational influence all the way out to the farthest suspected reaches of the Oort Cloud, I think the diameter would be something like 6 light years. This is probably the most generous estimate as to the size of the solar system, as you could define the boundary to end at the heliosphere instead. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is something like 100,000 light years. So the most generous sizing of our solar system relative to (divided by) a fairly conservative sizing of the galaxy is 0.00006 or 0.006% of the galaxy’s width if I’ve done my math correctly.
Then the closest major galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away, and the observable universe has a diameter of 93 billion light years. To me the preponderance of evidence suggests that the universe continues infinitely beyond the boundary of this observable universe.
So that’s space. We are less than a speck in it.
What about time?
The universe is thought to be 13.8 billion years old. Most cosmologists believe that the universe will expand infinitely and ultimately reach maximum entropy and conditions where star formation is no longer possible, stars will burn out, and even black holes will evaporate. It will become impossible for life to exist. This will play out over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and the dead universe will as far as we can tell continue in this state infinitely. The conditions where life is possible will asymptotically approach non existence over this time scale.
All this to say, we occupy a place in time in space that is beyond infinitesimal and we should embrace this with gratitude.
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Here is a counterintuitive fact. The coldest known place in the solar system is very close to home, on our moon, at 26 kelvins: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermite_(crater)
When you consider how close that is to the sun relative to the size of the solar system that is very surprising. At least to me.
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@sophisto000 stunning.
Looks like it could be, or have been, a star forming region?
Speaking of star forming, it’s fascinating to me that the most extreme physical environments and phenomena stem from the weakest fundamental force: gravity. Turtle beats hare!
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@mclaincausey
http://hendrenimaging.net/astrophotography.html
I’m well out of my depth here. Seeing this thread for the first time, and it made me think of some of the great photos he’s shared with me. There’s a brief description on the photo in the link, hope you enjoy! -
Wow these are fascinating. Thanks again!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2244
Described as a young region only 5MM years old with a bunch of really big, really hot, really rare stars. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it but sure is beautiful to look at.
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Congratulations! It's really hard to get my head around the magnitude of that achievement and very humbling.
Unrelated to this stunning accomplishment: to any Audible subscribers, included for free with your subscription: Ray Porter, one of my favorite narrators, did the narration for the book The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by the incredible Leonard Susskind, and it is truly excellent. Almost as good as having the author read it himself (he is a fantastic lecturer).
Lots of mind-bending stuff in there around black holes, string theory, quantum field theory, and the hypothesis that our reality is a hologram coded on a distant 2D surface, presented fairly accessibly without too much math (thank goodness).
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@pechelman To tell you the truth, I'm pretty neutral about space exploration stuff, but I teared up at the human magnitude of that achievement. Extraordinary.....
