No, you are not the center of the universe.
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I’d never seen that one before, but those videos always evoke the emotion that I first felt when I began (casually) studying Astronomy — humility.
Get Celestia in your life: http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/
Also, the music is from the end credits to Blade Runner :-)
Being an old soundtrack fan I also recognized a small sample of the Alien soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith at the beginning and the Main theme from the Black Hole by John Barry as the music for the bulk of the video.
A musician friend of mine who listened to the Black Hole theme said it made him dizzy because it was a good musical attempt at giving someone the impression of spinning round and round.
The Black Hole. Now that was a quality flick.
Vangelis rules.
Awesome (and then some)
Though it did start getting incomphrehendibly mind-boggling at bout Pollux. Too big man. Way too big.
I think Betelgeuse has actually been found to be bigger now. Could be wrong.
at that point, we’re in the category of really, really big and it doesn’t matter any more.
stars have made me feel small since childhood. it’s a perspective i enjoy.
I used to love it when I was an angsty teenager because I lived in the countryside and when I was feeling low I could go and look up at the night sky and see the arm of the Milky Way sweeping East-West accrosss the sky. Awesome, just awesome. I really miss it now that I live in a city.
Compared to Pollux, you are correct. Antares is Betelgeuse’s big brother!
Made me think about the opening scene of “Spaceballs”
Wow, forgot how awesome the black hole soundtrack is.
Downloading now…
Astronomy is so AWESOME.
I’m ashamed it took me until I was eighteen to really start enjoying the enormity of the rest of the universe.
Awww, I’m bummed… I thought this was going to be about “size comparisons” of Stars like Brad Pitt or George Clooney =(
This just goes to show how irrelevant topics like that are in the grand scheme of things. I’m glad I don’t cling to the “limelight.”
Actually, I am the center of the observable universe. And so is everyone else. Or to put it another way: The universe has no absolute center.
Another moral ruined by pedantry.
And to give Humans some scale on here, On a smooth globe, the paint on the globe is higher than a too-scale Mt. Everest would be. One layer paint is higher than Mt. Everest.
If the Earth were shrunk down to a comparable size, it would be smoother than a cue ball.
I wonder if this is an accurate representation. It looks like they’re pulling the camera away while focusing on the new object, which would skew the “results” a little bit. Wonder if they took that pulling back into account and made it the previous object comparatively bigger so we could accurately see how big the next object it.
Interesting that stars can be so large but planets apparently don’t get much larger than Jupiter which would be a microsopic speck in relation to Beetlejuice. Do any of the giants have planets?
We can’t tell yet. Our current methods of looking for planets work by observing any gravitational or spectroscopic influence these planets have on their stars. It won’t work with stars this massive.
If the stars do have planets, I imagine they’ll be completely blasted by radiation. Though, if I’m not mistaken, such giant stars have such a short lifespan that a proper planetary system won’t have time to form before the star dies in a most spectacular way.
So I was just thinking. What if these gigantic stars had planets proportional in size to the planets in our solar system.
“The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris; a red hypergiant star in the constellation Canis Major, located about 5,000 light-years from Earth. University of Minnesota professor Roberta Humphreys recently calculated its upper size at more than 2,100 times the size of the Sun. Placed in our Solar System, its surface would extend out past the orbit of Saturn. Light takes more than 8 hours to cross its circumference!”
If one of those hypothetical proportional planets was inhabited it would probably be by beings thousands of times larger than ourselves. They would probably be oblivious to us as we are to ants. Interacting or communicating with them would be as difficult as it is for us to communicate with ants. I’m just saying. If an ant wanted to communicate with you, how would he go about it? Would you even notice?
If such a planet could exist (ignoring that it would turn stellar from its own gravity), it would more likely contain at most bacterial life, as anything larger than that would be crushed.
If such a planet could exist, it is possible that due to the ambient pressures, aggregate diamond nanorods or buckyfoam would be feasible biologically constructable materials. In which case, it is possible for macroorganisms utilizing these substances to withstand the structural stresses of atmospheric pressure.
Now *that* would be cool!
It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, if organisms didn’t evolve the trick of calcium phosphate deposition, there wouldn’t be a creature larger than a tarantula outside the water anywhere on this planet.
No matter their structure, just moving around in several thousand g’s and several thousand atmospheres would be a formidable challenge for any organism, though.
And it’s not like they would be helped by living in the sea, as the deepest seas and the tallest mountains would probably differ in height by less than a millimetre.
Using an old article I found online in a brief search with google(for extrasolar planets,size) I got a confirmation to what I thought reading nomad’s comment, many of the extra solar planets found,especially once humanity began to first be able to detect them are larger or much larger than Jupiter, granted in the last 5 or so years as things have changed that’s not always the case but it’s still much easier to find really big objects in space than ‘rocky’ planets,even though I think we are up to around 50(or more) discovered extrasolar planets few(if any) are not gas giants, now the quote from a page of text, which I will follow with the info for it’s authors.
Detection of an eighth planet was reported in April 1997, when a nine-member team led by Robert W. Noyes of Harvard University detected a planet orbiting the star Rho Coronae Borealis. A ninth large object, which orbits the star known by its catalogue number HD114762, has also been observed–an object first detected in 1989 by astronomer David W. Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his collaborators. But this bulky companion has a mass more than 10 times that of Jupiter–large, though not unlike another large object discovered around the star 70 Virginis, a similar object with a mass 6.8 times that of Jupiter. The objects orbiting both HD114762 and 70 Virginis are so large that most astronomers are not sure whether to consider them big planets or small brown dwarfs, entities whose masses lie between those of a planet and a star.
the authors
GEOFFREY W. MARCY and R. PAUL BUTLER together have found six of the eight planets around sunlike stars reported to date. Marcy is a Distinguished University Professor at San Francisco State University and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler is a staff astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
I think this was put on the net around or prior to 2000,so there is newer info out there,I just went with a quick search and grab.
I believe they have now found > 300 extrasolar planets. The smallest of which, IIRC, is about 2.5 – 3x the size of earth.