Ladies and gentlemen! We are in a state of emergency.
Okay, I'm overreacting. But still, I feel it is my duty to make this blog, even though it will likely never reach the people who this post is targeted to. Nonetheless, hopefully it's a little interesting for the regular readers, all 6 of you and the accompanying 40 bots and web crawlers I assume my audience includes.
So I was made aware that it might not be common knowledge, or it is and this person just missed the 80 science classes I'm sure this was discussed in over the last 10 years of their education, that our solar system is NOT THE ONLY SOLAR SYSTEM OUT THERE. I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAD TO WRITE THAT. I ALSO FORGOT TO TAKE CAPS LOCK OFF and didn't want to retype any of that.
Now I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, but let's go back to square one here.
Next time you're outside at night, not you fake audience, just the real people, look up!
Those twinkling white dots, those are stars! On an unrelated note, they only twinkle because of our atmosphere.
In fact, our Sun is a star. Sun is just its name. It's a relatively small star and about in the middle of its lifetime. Irrelevant, but maybe a topic for another day.
So we all know that our solar system, the space generally around our local star, contains planets, asteroids, and other celestial bodies. The star is near or at the center of the solar system, meaning all large enough celestial bodies orbit around it.
Orbits occur because of gravity. Each major celestial body, such as Earth, has a large enough mass to have its own gravity. So the larger a celestial body is, the more mass it has, and therefore, the more gravity it has. Earth is bigger than the moon which means the moon orbits around Earth. The Sun is massive compared to every other celestial body in our solar system, and therefore everything orbits around it.
Every star you see in the night's sky is another solar system. Meaning every star up in the sky (in space if we're being accurate), has celestial bodies which orbit it.
That's a lot of planets. But we're just scratching the surface.
You may have heard of the Milky Way. That's a galaxy. If you ever see pictures like this one, you're looking at a part of the Milky Way!
We can't see all of it because our solar system is inside the Milky Way. As you can see in the picture below, we are in one of the spiral arms (left side).
This image is also good because it puts a scale to the size of our Milky Way. 100,000 light years! But wait, what's a light year? Well, we can say it's an unfathomable distance. That's right, it's not a measure of time, but distance.
It can be described as the distance at which light travels in one year, at the speed of light.
Ummmm, Jay, I don't remember what the speed of light is.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. Or, 1 billion, 79 million kilometers per hour. Or, 670 million, 460 thousand miles per hour. It's the absolute maximum speed of the universe. Humans can not achieve even 1% of it. But that still doesn't answer the question of how far exactly is a light year?
One light year is approximately 9 trillion, 461 billion kilometers. Or for our American friends, about 5 trillion, 880 billion miles. Told you, unfathomable.
Our fastest spacecraft ever launched was the New Horizons probe which whizzed past Pluto not long ago. It was traveling at around 58,000 km/h. At this speed, it would take us 18620 years to travel 1 light year.
The closest star system to us is the Alpha Centauri system, which actually contains 3 stars! The star system, to us, looks like 1 star and is the 3rd brightest star in the sky (that was from a questionable source so I won't cite it).
Alpha Centauri is about 4.37 light years from our sun. Needless to say, we won't be getting anywhere near it in our lifetime.
So that's the Milky Way, but there are billions and billions of other galaxies, like our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. Images from here on get tricky, but all those galaxies make up the observable universe.
This post is getting a little long so I will cut it off here. Hopefully, you learned something!
As always, thanks for reading and until next time,
J
Okay, I'm overreacting. But still, I feel it is my duty to make this blog, even though it will likely never reach the people who this post is targeted to. Nonetheless, hopefully it's a little interesting for the regular readers, all 6 of you and the accompanying 40 bots and web crawlers I assume my audience includes.
So I was made aware that it might not be common knowledge, or it is and this person just missed the 80 science classes I'm sure this was discussed in over the last 10 years of their education, that our solar system is NOT THE ONLY SOLAR SYSTEM OUT THERE. I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAD TO WRITE THAT. I ALSO FORGOT TO TAKE CAPS LOCK OFF and didn't want to retype any of that.
Now I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, but let's go back to square one here.
Next time you're outside at night, not you fake audience, just the real people, look up!
Those twinkling white dots, those are stars! On an unrelated note, they only twinkle because of our atmosphere.
In fact, our Sun is a star. Sun is just its name. It's a relatively small star and about in the middle of its lifetime. Irrelevant, but maybe a topic for another day.
So we all know that our solar system, the space generally around our local star, contains planets, asteroids, and other celestial bodies. The star is near or at the center of the solar system, meaning all large enough celestial bodies orbit around it.
Orbits occur because of gravity. Each major celestial body, such as Earth, has a large enough mass to have its own gravity. So the larger a celestial body is, the more mass it has, and therefore, the more gravity it has. Earth is bigger than the moon which means the moon orbits around Earth. The Sun is massive compared to every other celestial body in our solar system, and therefore everything orbits around it.
Every star you see in the night's sky is another solar system. Meaning every star up in the sky (in space if we're being accurate), has celestial bodies which orbit it.
That's a lot of planets. But we're just scratching the surface.
You may have heard of the Milky Way. That's a galaxy. If you ever see pictures like this one, you're looking at a part of the Milky Way!
We can't see all of it because our solar system is inside the Milky Way. As you can see in the picture below, we are in one of the spiral arms (left side).
This image is also good because it puts a scale to the size of our Milky Way. 100,000 light years! But wait, what's a light year? Well, we can say it's an unfathomable distance. That's right, it's not a measure of time, but distance.
It can be described as the distance at which light travels in one year, at the speed of light.
Ummmm, Jay, I don't remember what the speed of light is.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. Or, 1 billion, 79 million kilometers per hour. Or, 670 million, 460 thousand miles per hour. It's the absolute maximum speed of the universe. Humans can not achieve even 1% of it. But that still doesn't answer the question of how far exactly is a light year?
One light year is approximately 9 trillion, 461 billion kilometers. Or for our American friends, about 5 trillion, 880 billion miles. Told you, unfathomable.
Our fastest spacecraft ever launched was the New Horizons probe which whizzed past Pluto not long ago. It was traveling at around 58,000 km/h. At this speed, it would take us 18620 years to travel 1 light year.
The closest star system to us is the Alpha Centauri system, which actually contains 3 stars! The star system, to us, looks like 1 star and is the 3rd brightest star in the sky (that was from a questionable source so I won't cite it).
Alpha Centauri is about 4.37 light years from our sun. Needless to say, we won't be getting anywhere near it in our lifetime.
So that's the Milky Way, but there are billions and billions of other galaxies, like our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. Images from here on get tricky, but all those galaxies make up the observable universe.
This post is getting a little long so I will cut it off here. Hopefully, you learned something!
As always, thanks for reading and until next time,
J
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