My socks were appropriately blown off but I still didn’t get invited.
Praise the sun!
Looks like a dead pixel.
The scale of the universe continues to blow my mind.
Prepare that mind for further blowage
This series is great. Thanks so much! I am getting sucked into a black hole of these videos.
Always happy to introduce a new person to Kurzgesagt
Science Journalists; Neil Degrasse Tyson claims dead pixels may actually be Mercury sized planets!
Too autistic for this. Why would it be unsettling? Mercury is much smaller than the sun. If it was suddenly bigger in proportion to the sun, then I’d be unsettled.
It’s very hard to convey the size of the sun in a photo. On earth, it isn’t bigger than the moon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, in a real photo, just how massive the sun is. I absolutely dwarfs a planet, which is kind of chilling. I’ve never seen a photo that shows anything further away from the camera than a planet AND that much bigger.
It doesn’t exactly unsettle me, but pondering the mind-boggling scale of celestial bodies and the cosmos can certainly be… humbling, I guess?
I had a co-worker a while back who couldn’t talk about the great scale of the universe cause he’d get freaked out. It didn’t come up much, but when it did, he’d be like, “Please stop, it’s stressing me out” so we’d change the subject.
That guy goes to so many birthday parties
Less about size and more about size and relative distance. Think about being on Mercury and the entire sky is blazing sun - and yet it survives.
on Mercury and the entire sky is blazing sun
I’ve never thought about this and holy shit
That’s not the case though. Sure the sun would seem bigger on mercury but it’s not gonna fill the entire sky.
Edit: According to NASA the sun would appear 3 times bigger and 7 times brighter on mercury.
I mean, nothing on Mercury survives. At night it’s -170 degrees Celsius and +430 degrees at day.
There was a time people thought Mercury would have some “twilight” acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.
You’re not invited to my birthday party.
Right, I feel like no astronomer should be unsettled by just a picture of our solar system.
Praise the Sun! \0/
How is the next transit of Venus not until 2117? That blows my socks’ mind. Seems like that should be happening very regularly.
It’s probably more about how often it’s visible in your part of the world than it happening at all if I had to guess.
Same reasons for any eclipses :
.1- plane of orbits (the one for Venus and the one for the Earth) do not exactly coincide and
.2- because distances between objects are much larger than objects, including size of the sun.I believe you. Still seems wild that I will never see another one in my lifetime.
My favorite fun astronomy fact is that a transit like this (Venus, but still) is how we managed to figure out our distance to the Sun in the 1700s
Ironically mercury while being the closest planet to the sun, isn’t the hottest planet in the solar system. Venus takes that title because of its atmosphere holding so much co2. Im sure its fine were putting so much of it in our atmosphere.
Yeah I prefer summer to winter so if we get summer and super summer now I would enjoy that until I’m dead and after that, why should I care?
/s just in case.
Finally my investment on Arctic Beachside property will pay off.
The beach is great. The only issue is that on days worth going, lots of other folks will be there.
We heat up the planet by 4 or 5 degrees, it’s gonna get much less crowded. It’ll be like a perfect, permanent vacation.
Ackchually, that’s just a photography of mercury, not the actual planet on your screen.
username checks out
Okay Magritte
This small circle is the sun, absolutely dwarfed by the earth taking up the rest of the frame. Definitely unsettling.
You shouldn’t stare too long at this photo with your naked eye or you’ll go blind.
What if I give my eye undies?
That will express to your eye your undieing love.
But only if they’re clean undies, otherwise it could express conjunctivitis to your eyes.
Puts in perspective how small Mercury is.
it probly only look tiny cause it’s far away
Yeah, the earth is actually a lot bigger than it looks on the photo. The photo is only a few centimeters, but the earth is at least 10x bigger than that!
Proof that light is a particle and not a wave?
Yes, but also both. (a simple example follows)
Think of it like you being at work or home. If I check your house, either you’re there, or you aren’t. If you’re there, you’re at home, simple. If not at home, you’re at work.
Same with your work: either you’re there when I check - or you aren’t, therefore at home.
But before I check either location (it’s understood that you are only in 1 of those 2 places), you are effectively in both places, and neither place, all at once.
And if I work from home?
Then you are either at work or at home. But until I check, you are out getting tacos.
Checkmate physicists
What if all particles are waves. They just temporarily form loops that we consider to have particle behaviour when observed on a larger scale.
Great, Brian Greene’s been drinking again.
Mercury is like 30-50 sun’s diameters away from the sun. This perspective makes it look like it’s almost touching.
Size scale matches though
Yeah this perspective is weird. It makes it look like the sun takes up 90% of the sky on mercury. That can’t be right though.
Almost 30 million miles closer to us than the sun is.
I’m sorry but my socks are still on. 100% wool.
Well, my socks are off.
…so are my pants
and underwear
and shirt
Who picks wool for their fucking socks?
There’s nothing sexy about wool.
EDIT: Fucking. Intercourse. Pun.
I think they can be sexy. Also the point of socks isn’t only to be sexy.
Wool socks are the best and I won’t be entertaining assertions to the contrary. Wool is temperature regulating, not just super thick and hot, so there are wool socks you can wear in the summer. They also don’t hold odor (bacteria) as much.
And they stay insulating even if soaked all the way through. Perfect for hiking or trudging through snow
You are spot on. Add to that, merino wool with an antibacterial coating for sports use eg skiing. Wool socks are the only kind I don’t wear holes through in a matter of months.
Wool is also more durable than cotton, so buying wool, or wool blend socks makes logical sense for something that takes a lot of wear and tear, ie covering your feet.
From that picture, it looks like you’d be on mercury and look up, see nothing but sun, But realistically it’s 60% closer than earth
looks kinda like this from the surface
Im struggling to parse this. The picture of the sun with the tiny dot when compared with the artists impression you posted. It just wont click together. How can the sun appear so big from the telescope compared to mercury but be so small from mercury’s perspective?
Edit. Actually i think it clicked. Mercury is so far from us and so smalkl that it appears like a small dot through that telescope even when zoomed in enough to see the sun that closley. Its actually still really far from the sun but our perspective and that flat picture makes it seem like its about to be consumed by the sun. If it was off to the side the distance would be more clear.
So more like this
S—‐-------------------------------M--------------------------------------V----------------------------------E
Than
S—M‐---------------------------------------------------------------------V----------------------------------E
If someone is struggling with it still, think about the moon.
On the surface of the moon, the sun looks basically like from the earth, small disk in the sky.
From
lunarsolar eclipses we know that just from 300.000km away (on earth) the moon looks just as big as the sun.Now imagine you travel just a couple million km further away, the moon will look smaller and smaller, while the sun stays almost the same (as the distance to the moon will be 10 times bigger and the distance to the sun will increase by like 2%). If you are just 3 million km away from earth the moon will be a small-ish dot in front of the sun (it would cover about 1% of the suns disk, if my math maths out).
For context, the moon and mercury are quite comparable in size.
Yep, zoom and narrow aperture really messes with perspective.
It’s kind of opposite of the tilt shift photos that make real life things look fake.
