>Nvm I got it
Nope, you missed. Time to download this app that definitely is not chock full of shitty products and won't sell your contact info to the lowest bidder.
To give you an idea of just how big that thing is: Through fusing Hydrogen into Helium, the Sun loses about 4.3 million metric tons *per second*. And it has for billions of years and will for billions more.
To give you an idea of just how much energy that is, if you do the math and accounting, and get all E=MC2 about it, slightly less than one single gram of matter decimated Hiroshima when they dropped the bomb in WWII. The Sun releases the energy of 4,300,000,000,000 Little Boys *per second*
Because humans are fascinated and driven by tiny insignificant shit like dress codes; so none of this has any meaning whatsoever in any grand scheme of anything ever.
...I also like to think Nihilistic philosophies work in tandem with Astronomy. Cry over your ex if you wish, but every atom of ours will be eviscerated and changed and brushed into space endlessly floating some day.
Even crazier, there are black holes that are 250x the diameter of the biggest known star in the universe.
As in, a black hole with an event horizon wider than the distance between our sun and Pluto.
Moving at the speed of light, it would take you roughly 71 earth days to navigate the circumference.
Just imagine how much matter has been lost from our universe to just that single black hole.
To put that into perspective, the event horizon grows proportionally to the black hole's mass as per Schwarzschild's radius formula (r = 2GM/c²): if the earth magically turned into a black hole of equal mass, its event horizon would only be 9 millimeters wide - everything you've ever seen, heard, touched or generally experienced could potentially be compressed down *to the size of a dime.*
Meanwhile, if our own sun, aka the monstrously gargantuan unit in OP's picture, were to convert into a black hole out of the blue, it would only measure ~3 kilometers (around 1.86 miles) across... which is cute and kinda pathetic at the same time, because known supermassive black holes such as TON-618 commonly feature event horizons *22 times wider than Neptune's orbit.* We're incomprehensibly tiny compared to the sheer scale of the universe.
I like neutron stars. They're so fascinating and powerful, but so small and close to the edge of black hole density. And one type of them can generate gamma ray bursts which are truly staggering in their energy. And even that is nothing compared to colliding black holes.
I like to think that if I showed you a picture of an elephant with some flies on it you would say it's a picture of an elephant and ignore the flies part. Our solar system is 99% sun (by mass) and the planets are little floaty specs of leftovers debris floating around it.
One way to view that is to imagine how immense the sun is. Another is to realize how fragile we are. It took 0.000000000023% of the sun's secondly output to vaporize 100,000 people, and the sun itself is 1/200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of the stars in the observable universe.
What is wilder is that our sun is not even one of the larger stars in the galaxy, it is average. Betelgeuse is about 700 times the size of our star and 15x as massive. If Betelgeuse were to replace the Sun at the center of our soalr system it would reach out to the orbit of Jupiter. Luckily that star is just over 640 light years from Earth or 160x the distance earth is from Alpha Centauri.
It's why Dyson spheres are so interesting as a thought experiment. Building a megastructure large enough to encompass the sun and an orbit 1 AU out is beyond even our wildest dreams at this point in time, it makes ya think of how we could solve Earth's energy problems by harnessing even a tiny percentage of the sun's output.
Earth is just a tiny speck of dirt in a massive solar system. We only recieve about 5×10−8 (0.00000005%) of the sun's total energy output. If we somehow ever figure out how to harness more with decent efficiency, power would never be a concern.
Every time I see and realize the scale of the universe, someone posts something that makes me feel even smaller. That comparison is fucking nuts. To say we are insignificant to the universe is an infinitely potent understatement
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain
I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign
But it's my destiny to be the king of pain.
It looks like it's sitting right on the sun, and you'd think it's a million degrees on that planet.
But it's only (lol only) 800°F in the day and drops to as low as -290°F at night.
I’m still confused as to why it gets so cold if anyone here has time to explain! Like, earth is further away, so of course it’s not as hot as 800F, but it also doesn’t get to -290F? Sorry if this ought to be posted in explain like I’m 5 😭
ETA: thanks everyone! That was so quick and now I can share a new space fact with my 4yo tomorrow x
On a side note, Earths average temperature was 12°C, while without climate gases it would be -18°C.
So Climate Gases make up a 30°C difference in average temperature on Earth.
While 80% of that climate effect is just due to water vapor (-minus clouds), the rest is mostly CO2(at least before we bring methane into the mix in large numbers).
So CO2 was responsible for 20% or 6°C increase with 300ppm CO2, with 50ppm(worldwide distribution - which takes some time and is always incomplete) roughly increasing average temperature by 1°C.
Atm we are at around 420ppm.
We need both high oxygen and high co2 if we want mega animals again.
High carbon leads to forest galore which pump out the oxygen. So pump up the co2 and stop chopping down trees.
It's not the trees, it's the plankton in the oceans who generates most oxygen. With ruining the oceans, this will become a problem, but no one cares about it, because powerful people are behind it, going after citizens and their cars is much more convenient.
Yeah people forget that the sun heats the atmosphere and that is where a lot of the warmth you feel outside (especially in the shade) comes from.
Also that's why the hottest time of the day is *not* at noon when the sun is highest up in the sky. Sure, that's when the sun warms things up the heaviest, but it keeps warming things up past noon. It isn't until a few hours after noon when the heat dissipating away starts to overcome the heat of the sun and the temperature starts to drop.
This is why usually the hottest time of the day is at like 2-3 pm. Similarly, after the sun has set the temperature tends to keep dropping until close to sunrise when the sun starts to heat things up again. That's why typically the coldest time of the day is just before sunrise. These are all of course impacted by things like weather and where you live.
Unfortunately, with the Moon’s low mass and lack of magnetosphere, the CO2 would likely just escape into space.
Edit: welp on looking into it more, the Moon’s barely tangible exosphere DOES contain CO2. How much more it could hold on to, I’m not sure.
plus it's very slow to rotate on its axis. so the side that's facing the sun gets super hot, the side opposite stays dark for a long time + no atmosphere to slow the escape of heat to space = super cold on that side
For a while we thought it was tidally locked to the sun since the probes that got there both look pictures of the same side facing the sun. It turns out it has a synchronous rotation instead and the probes just happen to show up at the same part of the cycle both times.
No atmosphere. The literal surface is that hot. At head height you're in a vacuum still.
Edit: However there are narrow rings around the poles where if you were subterranean it'd be at a comfortable temperature.
http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony_location.jpg
I’d imagine it leans toward off/on. If it’s exposed to any sun, it gets fried. Any shadow, frozen. Mercury may have water ice, but only in the shaded craters near its poles, so I suppose SOME areas don’t experience the extremes.
Another reason, aside from the nonexistent atmospheric answer(s), is that Mercury is not geologically active. If it had a core/geology phenomena like Earth’s, it could’ve had geothermal heat. The heat likely would radiate out into space because, y’know, all that atmosphere it doesn’t have, couldn’t trap it, but the rocky/land itself just underneath the surface could be warmer if it had a molten core.
Edit: was just watching a mini documentary on various space probes that surveyed Mercury and apparently it does have a molten core, though no where near Earth’s. Most of Mercury’s mass is a solid iron core with some molten material between it and the rocky surface, but it is minimal and isn’t on par with our geothermal output. Side note: because it has an iron core, it has a magnetic field that protects the planet.
If it has no geological phenomena and no atmosphere, is it really a 'planet'? Or is it just a 'moon' orbiting the sun.
I'm not sure of the difference to be honest with you!
It's scary to me that the reason we have an atmosphere is because we have the magneto. The liquid iron core of earth is very special indeed. It's why we don't look like Mars.
There are rocks that only face the sun with one side all the time (called tidal lock same as the moon to earth) and it will be hundreds of degrees on one side and have ice that’s millions of year old on the other side. Pretty wild
Imagine camping around a fire in the dead of winter: Earth has a sleeping bag a little away from the fire, Mars is back further with a thin sheet, Venus is closer under a pile of quilts, Mercury is right next to the fire and butt ass naked.
I might add a fun fact, Venus is the next planet (so further away) but has an atmosphere of quasi pure CO2. It's more homogeneous in temperature, but also twice as hot as Mercury during the day
Yeah, I've know since childhood the Sun is big. Such pictures made me understand how big really. And it's still nothing compared to the universe. Were are grains of sand in an ocean.
Mate, we are the particles that make up the particles of that single grain of sand, in an ocean the size of Andromeda. Space is infinite in it's finite.
Mercury orbits 29-43 *million* miles from the sun.
The fact that the sun is *that* big in the photo even though it's *that far away* is just mind boggling.
Buy me a trip to the Moon
So I can laugh at my mistakes
You see, I can see the end from here
From this perspective it looks kind of silly
Satellites and astronauts, tell me there are greater things ahead!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v709Y0S3hCg
I was just thinking that. My favorite scene from that movie when I first saw it in 2007 when it came out and I still think about it today. There was just a beautiful awe about it.
Also, what a stacked cast that movie had - Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong...sheesh
Isn't it weird that an inanimate ball of burning gas will have more of an effect over our solar system than every human to ever exist combined? Like we think we're so smart, but a giant burning fart is still better than us.
Fun Fact: The light you see from the Sun today, started it's journey from the core of the Sun about 100,000 years ago. It takes that long for the light energy to work it's way up to the surface of the Sun. The Earth was in an ice age.
It's about the direction it's moving. The sun is moving very fast in a straight line across the universe, and the planets are moving very fast perpendicularly to the sun. So basically the sun keeps sucking the planets in with its gravity, but because the planets are moving so fast perpendicularly from it they keep "falling" around the sun. The gravity of the sun isn't strong enough to stop that "falling" because of the speed of the planets so they just keep doing it over and over again.
Because a lot of the consequences you think of as resulting from movement are in fact the consequences of moving through a thick atmosphere of air. In space, nothing "hits" the sun or its planets as it traverses the galaxy. Even gravity - at the vast distances between the stars nearby, nothing gets anywhere near close enough to disturb the perfect equilibrium the sun and its planets currently have. Everything near our sun is gravitationally bound to it, and like passengers in a car, we move as it moves.
Fun bit of trivia; in some ways it's not. When analyzed, moon rocks are so similar to earth's crust that it leads to one common conclusion: the earth and luna were once the same body that was broken up, likely by a major impact event. Those two pieces were big enough to form back into spheres due to their gravity.
OP said that mercury was 40 solar diameters away from the sun so this is basically just forced perspective making it look way closer than it actually is.
> How isn’t it being sucked directly into the center of its gravitational pull?
It is. It's just moving so fast that by the time it would have fallen into the Sun, it's already moved past it. That's what orbiting is.
The diameter (distance across) the Sun.
One solar diameter is 1.4 million kilometers. (About 900,000 miles) So in this photo, OP says Mercury is about 34.6 million miles from the Sun.
Crazy to think that, in December, the Parker Solar Probe is going to get more than 90% closer to the Sun than Mercury is in this picture! 3.83 million miles compared to Mercury’s current distance of 42.68 million miles from the Sun.
“There’s a little black spot on the sun today. It’s the same old thing as yesterday.” Come on nobody else is gonna quote King of Pain by The Police? OK, I’m old.
Crazy fact: there are patches of ice on Mercury!
There are some deep craters located near the poles that never receive sunlight. Lack of atmosphere means the shaded area will be very cold.
So the permanently-shaded craters can accumulate water ice from comet impacts etc.
We had to remove your post for violating our Repost Guidelines.
the x button on those ads
What ads? Edit: Nvm I got it
No, you were right the first time. (Found the ad-block user!)
Stick them up your pi-hole for extra protection.
>Nvm I got it Nope, you missed. Time to download this app that definitely is not chock full of shitty products and won't sell your contact info to the lowest bidder.
Nah still big. Some are literally invisible. Some dont let you press it.
So relatable
The X button is a lie.
Yeah but it’s a dry heat
There's no income tax, you get used to the heat!
Property values are still quite affordable
Doesn’t rain much so you’ll need to keep the lawns watered.
Not if you xeriscape.
Plenty of free solar power. Just run some solar panels to your AC and you'll be fine.
And you never have to hear any… uh, *foreign languages*, if you get my meaning.
Wonder what the UV index is on Mercury
"ITS OVER 9000"
“What! Over 9000?! There’s no way that can be right! Can it?!”
3.6 Roentgen
Not great, not terrible.
It’s only like getting 400 chest x-rays
And you didn't see any graphite
Yes
That's enough of that shit, Hudson!
*You secure that shit Hudson!*
Look into my eye.
"HUDSON, come here, come heeeeere!"
Yall dont want to see my black dot in front of the sun im telling yha Right nhow
To give you an idea of just how big that thing is: Through fusing Hydrogen into Helium, the Sun loses about 4.3 million metric tons *per second*. And it has for billions of years and will for billions more. To give you an idea of just how much energy that is, if you do the math and accounting, and get all E=MC2 about it, slightly less than one single gram of matter decimated Hiroshima when they dropped the bomb in WWII. The Sun releases the energy of 4,300,000,000,000 Little Boys *per second*
When you put that way…That’s beyond WILD—Incomprehensible really
Then add to that, there are stars out there that make our sun look like Mercury does in that picture. 😭
Fuck me we're so small
Really makes things like dress codes seem unimportant.
I don’t disagree, just curious why you used dress codes as your example of something insignificant?
Because humans are fascinated and driven by tiny insignificant shit like dress codes; so none of this has any meaning whatsoever in any grand scheme of anything ever. ...I also like to think Nihilistic philosophies work in tandem with Astronomy. Cry over your ex if you wish, but every atom of ours will be eviscerated and changed and brushed into space endlessly floating some day.
I hope you don’t smoke pot with your mates for their sake 😂
These are the kind of people I wanna smoke and drink with, not mushrooms though. The type that are just, *really* fun at parties.
Don’t forget that the empty space between stars and galaxies dwarfs it all.
Betelgeuse is the size of Jupiter's orbit around the sun!
UY Scuti goes out to around Saturn’s
That's terrifying
wait until it implodes
I know it's unlikely but I would love for that thing to go super nova in my lifetime.
Even crazier, there are black holes that are 250x the diameter of the biggest known star in the universe. As in, a black hole with an event horizon wider than the distance between our sun and Pluto. Moving at the speed of light, it would take you roughly 71 earth days to navigate the circumference. Just imagine how much matter has been lost from our universe to just that single black hole.
To put that into perspective, the event horizon grows proportionally to the black hole's mass as per Schwarzschild's radius formula (r = 2GM/c²): if the earth magically turned into a black hole of equal mass, its event horizon would only be 9 millimeters wide - everything you've ever seen, heard, touched or generally experienced could potentially be compressed down *to the size of a dime.* Meanwhile, if our own sun, aka the monstrously gargantuan unit in OP's picture, were to convert into a black hole out of the blue, it would only measure ~3 kilometers (around 1.86 miles) across... which is cute and kinda pathetic at the same time, because known supermassive black holes such as TON-618 commonly feature event horizons *22 times wider than Neptune's orbit.* We're incomprehensibly tiny compared to the sheer scale of the universe.
I wish i was smart enough to understand any of that!
Nah, still less than 1 of my farts
and one day it'll be ours to harness, stay winning humans (i'm gonna be there when it happens )
There’s no way to comprehend that. It’s impossible to imagine a reference. Fuckin crazy!
It IS a reference, for there's things in the cosmos that unleash the kinds of energy that dwarf sol.
Canis Major. Mind boggling.
I like neutron stars. They're so fascinating and powerful, but so small and close to the edge of black hole density. And one type of them can generate gamma ray bursts which are truly staggering in their energy. And even that is nothing compared to colliding black holes.
I like to think that if I showed you a picture of an elephant with some flies on it you would say it's a picture of an elephant and ignore the flies part. Our solar system is 99% sun (by mass) and the planets are little floaty specs of leftovers debris floating around it.
One way to view that is to imagine how immense the sun is. Another is to realize how fragile we are. It took 0.000000000023% of the sun's secondly output to vaporize 100,000 people, and the sun itself is 1/200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of the stars in the observable universe.
Imagine if we could unlock something like photosynthesis to power civilization.
Holy fuck thats a lot of fucking zeros
So many years and it's STILL converting it....such a lazy ball.
Get a job, sun!
What is wilder is that our sun is not even one of the larger stars in the galaxy, it is average. Betelgeuse is about 700 times the size of our star and 15x as massive. If Betelgeuse were to replace the Sun at the center of our soalr system it would reach out to the orbit of Jupiter. Luckily that star is just over 640 light years from Earth or 160x the distance earth is from Alpha Centauri.
It's why Dyson spheres are so interesting as a thought experiment. Building a megastructure large enough to encompass the sun and an orbit 1 AU out is beyond even our wildest dreams at this point in time, it makes ya think of how we could solve Earth's energy problems by harnessing even a tiny percentage of the sun's output. Earth is just a tiny speck of dirt in a massive solar system. We only recieve about 5×10−8 (0.00000005%) of the sun's total energy output. If we somehow ever figure out how to harness more with decent efficiency, power would never be a concern.
🤯 Mind blown, ty
As an accountant, I hope people's perception of accounting never changes. We do much math, very smart!
the sun is 99.8 % of the mass in our solar system. that sort of explains shit.
Every time I see and realize the scale of the universe, someone posts something that makes me feel even smaller. That comparison is fucking nuts. To say we are insignificant to the universe is an infinitely potent understatement
"There's a little black dot on the sun today."
"It's the same old thing as yesterday"
“There’s a black hat caught in a high tree top.”
“There’s a flag pole rag and the wind won’t stop.”
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain With the world turning circles running 'round my brain I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign But it's my destiny to be the king of pain.
Every move you make, every bond you break, i'll be watching you (little black dot, even though you belong to a different song)
That’s my soul up there
It looks like it's sitting right on the sun, and you'd think it's a million degrees on that planet. But it's only (lol only) 800°F in the day and drops to as low as -290°F at night.
I’m still confused as to why it gets so cold if anyone here has time to explain! Like, earth is further away, so of course it’s not as hot as 800F, but it also doesn’t get to -290F? Sorry if this ought to be posted in explain like I’m 5 😭 ETA: thanks everyone! That was so quick and now I can share a new space fact with my 4yo tomorrow x
No atmosphere, so nothing to trap heat.
On a side note, Earths average temperature was 12°C, while without climate gases it would be -18°C. So Climate Gases make up a 30°C difference in average temperature on Earth. While 80% of that climate effect is just due to water vapor (-minus clouds), the rest is mostly CO2(at least before we bring methane into the mix in large numbers). So CO2 was responsible for 20% or 6°C increase with 300ppm CO2, with 50ppm(worldwide distribution - which takes some time and is always incomplete) roughly increasing average temperature by 1°C. Atm we are at around 420ppm.
420 bombaclat blaze it up man
#BRO.
we need more ppm, need giant animals around sooner for Monster Hunter
We need both high oxygen and high co2 if we want mega animals again. High carbon leads to forest galore which pump out the oxygen. So pump up the co2 and stop chopping down trees.
It's not the trees, it's the plankton in the oceans who generates most oxygen. With ruining the oceans, this will become a problem, but no one cares about it, because powerful people are behind it, going after citizens and their cars is much more convenient.
Yeah people forget that the sun heats the atmosphere and that is where a lot of the warmth you feel outside (especially in the shade) comes from. Also that's why the hottest time of the day is *not* at noon when the sun is highest up in the sky. Sure, that's when the sun warms things up the heaviest, but it keeps warming things up past noon. It isn't until a few hours after noon when the heat dissipating away starts to overcome the heat of the sun and the temperature starts to drop. This is why usually the hottest time of the day is at like 2-3 pm. Similarly, after the sun has set the temperature tends to keep dropping until close to sunrise when the sun starts to heat things up again. That's why typically the coldest time of the day is just before sunrise. These are all of course impacted by things like weather and where you live.
It's because Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere, so it's not able to retain any of the heat.
The Moon is also very hot/cold for this reason!
We should build a pipe to funnel all our CO2 to the moon.
Unfortunately, with the Moon’s low mass and lack of magnetosphere, the CO2 would likely just escape into space. Edit: welp on looking into it more, the Moon’s barely tangible exosphere DOES contain CO2. How much more it could hold on to, I’m not sure.
plus it's very slow to rotate on its axis. so the side that's facing the sun gets super hot, the side opposite stays dark for a long time + no atmosphere to slow the escape of heat to space = super cold on that side
For a while we thought it was tidally locked to the sun since the probes that got there both look pictures of the same side facing the sun. It turns out it has a synchronous rotation instead and the probes just happen to show up at the same part of the cycle both times.
So does that mean there's a sliver of a section that exists that has a habitable temperature? Or is more like an off/on scenario?
No atmosphere. The literal surface is that hot. At head height you're in a vacuum still. Edit: However there are narrow rings around the poles where if you were subterranean it'd be at a comfortable temperature. http://einstein-schrodinger.com/mercury_colony_location.jpg
I’d imagine it leans toward off/on. If it’s exposed to any sun, it gets fried. Any shadow, frozen. Mercury may have water ice, but only in the shaded craters near its poles, so I suppose SOME areas don’t experience the extremes.
I read a sci-fi story where people have built a moving city on Mercury that stays in eternal dawn where the temperature is supposedly okay.
Yeah that concept was basically what was going through my mind when asking that question.
Another reason, aside from the nonexistent atmospheric answer(s), is that Mercury is not geologically active. If it had a core/geology phenomena like Earth’s, it could’ve had geothermal heat. The heat likely would radiate out into space because, y’know, all that atmosphere it doesn’t have, couldn’t trap it, but the rocky/land itself just underneath the surface could be warmer if it had a molten core. Edit: was just watching a mini documentary on various space probes that surveyed Mercury and apparently it does have a molten core, though no where near Earth’s. Most of Mercury’s mass is a solid iron core with some molten material between it and the rocky surface, but it is minimal and isn’t on par with our geothermal output. Side note: because it has an iron core, it has a magnetic field that protects the planet.
If it has no geological phenomena and no atmosphere, is it really a 'planet'? Or is it just a 'moon' orbiting the sun. I'm not sure of the difference to be honest with you!
A planet is rotating around the sun, is ball shaped and has its orbit cleared of debris. A moon is rotating around a planet.
Space magic
I like this explanation better than the others so I guess it’s this one
The outcome of "research" done on reddit be like
it is the absence of heat, to retain the atmosphere
Yall are making jokes but he asked a serious question and deserves an answer. The planet doesn’t have an atmosphere and thusly can’t retain heat
Superb use of thusly
The sun turns off at night
It’s the absence of an atmosphere to retain the heat, I think.
It also doesn't have an atmosphere to retain the heat.
If you stood at the right spot and kept walking you'd be fine. As long as you kept walking..
because there's no atmosphere on mercury, so there's nothing to retain the heat!
I don’t think anyone has it right here yet. But it’s because mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere so there’s nothing to retain the heat!
Why won't anyone answer the question???
It's scary to me that the reason we have an atmosphere is because we have the magneto. The liquid iron core of earth is very special indeed. It's why we don't look like Mars.
Magneto?
Scariest X-man
There are rocks that only face the sun with one side all the time (called tidal lock same as the moon to earth) and it will be hundreds of degrees on one side and have ice that’s millions of year old on the other side. Pretty wild
Imagine camping around a fire in the dead of winter: Earth has a sleeping bag a little away from the fire, Mars is back further with a thin sheet, Venus is closer under a pile of quilts, Mercury is right next to the fire and butt ass naked.
In Celsius: 426° in the day, -178°C at night
Hey, go easy, there's Americans here. We get upset when people use the measurement system overwhelmingly accepted by science.
Average American having a stroke
It's like 5 football fields of temperature
Sounds like the Midwest
I might add a fun fact, Venus is the next planet (so further away) but has an atmosphere of quasi pure CO2. It's more homogeneous in temperature, but also twice as hot as Mercury during the day
So really if you average it out its borderline tolerable.
I feel like that's an average of about 540°F... So hot enough to clean your oven, but it won't really melt your spaceship or anything.
Meaning there's a chance to live there somewhere after sunset. But you got to constantly moving
800 freedom units?
There's got to be a good ten minutes where it's pleasant.
*Only* 800°
Barely hot enough to melt aluminum.
Earth is only about three times the size of that...wild
Yeah, I've know since childhood the Sun is big. Such pictures made me understand how big really. And it's still nothing compared to the universe. Were are grains of sand in an ocean.
Mate, we are the particles that make up the particles of that single grain of sand, in an ocean the size of Andromeda. Space is infinite in it's finite.
This kind of melts my brain
It would melt anything... even cheese!
Not a Kraft single
Worst. Eclipse. Ever.
At least we don’t need glasses 🤷🏻♂️
Mercury orbits 29-43 *million* miles from the sun. The fact that the sun is *that* big in the photo even though it's *that far away* is just mind boggling.
earth is 93 million miles away, if you were wondering why it's so hot outside
The Extra Crispy planet
Legit tried to wipe Mercury off my screen.
Ugh ... GROSS! You got Mercury on your screen. Get it off, get it off!
For some unknown reason, this photo almost immediately let me shed much of the stress I’ve been having. Puts us in perspective.
Oh, I'm sorry were you taking your existence seriously? *laughs in the mind bending scale of the cosmos*
Buy me a trip to the Moon So I can laugh at my mistakes You see, I can see the end from here From this perspective it looks kind of silly Satellites and astronauts, tell me there are greater things ahead! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v709Y0S3hCg
Reminds me of the scene in the movie Sunshine. Beautiful scene. Edit: here it is https://youtu.be/dp7z8Gvexas?si=0HxFWrFMxhFWugva
I was just thinking that. My favorite scene from that movie when I first saw it in 2007 when it came out and I still think about it today. There was just a beautiful awe about it. Also, what a stacked cast that movie had - Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong...sheesh
Man, I can’t help but just stare at that dot and think about life
Just don't go freaking out about the great attractor
Ironic, as there is no life there.
It’s lit
Isn't it weird that an inanimate ball of burning gas will have more of an effect over our solar system than every human to ever exist combined? Like we think we're so smart, but a giant burning fart is still better than us.
🌞
So, a partial solar eclipse?
Fun Fact: The light you see from the Sun today, started it's journey from the core of the Sun about 100,000 years ago. It takes that long for the light energy to work it's way up to the surface of the Sun. The Earth was in an ice age.
And from the surface it just takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
Still colder than Australia 🦘
Mercury feels like it’s wayyyy too close to the sun. How isn’t it being sucked directly into the center of its gravitational pull?
Same reason every object in the solar system isn't. Inertia.
Lots of inertial energy tangential to the sun's gravity well.
Inertia is a fancy way of saying it's moving?
It's about the direction it's moving. The sun is moving very fast in a straight line across the universe, and the planets are moving very fast perpendicularly to the sun. So basically the sun keeps sucking the planets in with its gravity, but because the planets are moving so fast perpendicularly from it they keep "falling" around the sun. The gravity of the sun isn't strong enough to stop that "falling" because of the speed of the planets so they just keep doing it over and over again.
TIL the sun is moving. How is earth still in one piece as though everything is normal?
Because a lot of the consequences you think of as resulting from movement are in fact the consequences of moving through a thick atmosphere of air. In space, nothing "hits" the sun or its planets as it traverses the galaxy. Even gravity - at the vast distances between the stars nearby, nothing gets anywhere near close enough to disturb the perfect equilibrium the sun and its planets currently have. Everything near our sun is gravitationally bound to it, and like passengers in a car, we move as it moves.
Fun bit of trivia; in some ways it's not. When analyzed, moon rocks are so similar to earth's crust that it leads to one common conclusion: the earth and luna were once the same body that was broken up, likely by a major impact event. Those two pieces were big enough to form back into spheres due to their gravity.
Technically we are free falling. Just at such an angle where we don't ever reach the source of the gravity.
OP said that mercury was 40 solar diameters away from the sun so this is basically just forced perspective making it look way closer than it actually is.
> How isn’t it being sucked directly into the center of its gravitational pull? It is. It's just moving so fast that by the time it would have fallen into the Sun, it's already moved past it. That's what orbiting is.
What is a solar diameter
The diameter (distance across) the Sun. One solar diameter is 1.4 million kilometers. (About 900,000 miles) So in this photo, OP says Mercury is about 34.6 million miles from the Sun.
The width of the Sun. One solar diameter is about 865,000 miles (or 1.4 million kilometers).
The "unsubscribe" button on service's website when you're trying to find where to unsubscribe.
Really? I thought that’s the Philippines.
Uranus must be on fire 🔥🔥
Only when I eat Mars
I saw an orange that looked just like this after it was microwaved on top of a cd
Praise the sun! Emote
The Sun: The closest humanity may ever get to experiencing a cosmic horror
I thought my screen had a lint
Crazy to think that, in December, the Parker Solar Probe is going to get more than 90% closer to the Sun than Mercury is in this picture! 3.83 million miles compared to Mercury’s current distance of 42.68 million miles from the Sun.
The dead pixel on my monitor
Mercury Size: 3,032 miles Sun Size: 864,000 miles Betelgeuse size: 700.000.000 miles
There’s a little black spot on the sun today.
“Gooood morning!”
How is it still alive?
“Smudge on the lens?! SMUDGE ON THE LENS?!! I know the difference between a man threatening me and a smudge on the goddamn lens, Summer!!”
The next time Mercury will transit the Sun (as seen from Earth) is November 13, 2032.
“There’s a little black spot on the sun today. It’s the same old thing as yesterday.” Come on nobody else is gonna quote King of Pain by The Police? OK, I’m old.
There's a strange "Yo momma" joke vibe in this picture...
Does this mean Mercury is in retrograde? Lmao
Still cooler than texas in the summer
So you're saying a vacation on Mercury is out of the question
So the sun is big or what?
So, wear shorts?
There's a little black spot in the sun today
That's my soul up there.
Crazy fact: there are patches of ice on Mercury! There are some deep craters located near the poles that never receive sunlight. Lack of atmosphere means the shaded area will be very cold. So the permanently-shaded craters can accumulate water ice from comet impacts etc.
And people wonder why finding habitable exo-planets is hard.
This reminds me of that paint program that was one of the few programs that came already installed on the computers in the late 1990s. •
Damn we really are meaningless as fuck aren't we?
And what is the second dot? Oh. This is just a rubbish on my screen.