Originally posted by: SlitheryDee
There is some big fucking massive ass shit out there.
That's one way to describe it. :laugh:Originally posted by: SlitheryDee
There is some big fucking massive ass shit out there.
Originally posted by: IHAVEAQUESTION
So what's the minimum requirement for equipment for us to see other galaxies?
Originally posted by: jjsole
If this is meant to make me feel insignificant, its not going to work.
Originally posted by: Locut0s
Originally posted by: IHAVEAQUESTION
So what's the minimum requirement for equipment for us to see other galaxies?
Your eyeballs. The Andromeda galaxy and one or two others are easily visible on a good dark night if you know where to look.
Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Originally posted by: Locut0s
Originally posted by: IHAVEAQUESTION
So what's the minimum requirement for equipment for us to see other galaxies?
Your eyeballs. The Andromeda galaxy and one or two others are easily visible on a good dark night if you know where to look.
Or if you're in the Southern Hemisphere there's the large and small Magellanics clouds, the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way which have an angular size several times bigger than the moon.
Originally posted by: SlowSpyder
Originally posted by: jjsole
If this is meant to make me feel insignificant, its not going to work.
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot. This one makes me feel pretty insignificant.
Originally posted by: frostedflakes
Really old, but always worth reposting. Makes you feel pretty insignificant, huh?
I don't think a lot of people really comprehend the enormity of the universe. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and planets orbiting these stars. There's no way that our planet can be the only one with intelligent life.
Originally posted by: totalnoob
Click: http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/6254/353424.jpg
Mind=Blown, Bricks have been shat, etc.
Originally posted by: Confusednewbie1552
This may be a stupid question so I apologize in advance for any ignorance, but...
Is the diameter of Pollux really larger than that of our solar system?!?! (Pic 5 on the left)
Oops, scratch that. Updating info...Originally posted by: Confusednewbie1552
Is the diameter of Pollux really larger than that of our solar system?!?! (Pic 5 on the left)
Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Huh, so I did some checking on some numbers and it seems a lot of these images are extremely misleading. C354 Cephei appears to be hundreds of times larger than our own solar system in that image, but in fact if it were to replace the sun it would extend a bit past the orbit of Saturn.
Originally posted by: RocksteadyDotNet
Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Huh, so I did some checking on some numbers and it seems a lot of these images are extremely misleading. C354 Cephei appears to be hundreds of times larger than our own solar system in that image, but in fact if it were to replace the sun it would extend a bit past the orbit of Saturn.
But that's only because the distances of our solar system are misrepresented.
If the sun were the size of a basketball, jupiter would be 25m away.
Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Originally posted by: RocksteadyDotNet
Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Huh, so I did some checking on some numbers and it seems a lot of these images are extremely misleading. C354 Cephei appears to be hundreds of times larger than our own solar system in that image, but in fact if it were to replace the sun it would extend a bit past the orbit of Saturn.
But that's only because the distances of our solar system are misrepresented.
If the sun were the size of a basketball, jupiter would be 25m away.
Yeah it looks like the only thing that is actually wrong with the picture is the size of our solar system, which is around ~2,200 times the diameter of the Sun.
Originally posted by: totalnoob
Can somebody answer, how many times bigger than our sun is the largest known star? How many of our suns would fit inside it? What about earths??
It looks like 100 million+
Assuming the upper size limit of 2100 solar radii, light would take more than 8 hours to travel around the star's circumference, compared to 14.5 seconds for the sun. It would take over 7,000,000,000,000,000 (7 quadrillion) Earths to fill the volume of VY Canis Majoris. [14]
The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant measuring between 1800 to 2100 solar radii. Its volume is almost a billion times that of the Sun, though its density is much less. Canis Majoris means big dog in Latin. If it were located in the solar system, its surface would reach all the way out to the orbit of Saturn. Another way of saying this is that VY Canis Majoris is about 9 astronomical units (AUs) wide, nine times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. There must be larger stars located in other galaxies, but we presently lack telescopes powerful enough to resolve them. Hypertelescopes may help in this regard.
VY Canis Majoris is a star in its final death throes. It is ejecting massive amounts of material into a surrounding nebula that makes the star blocked in the visible spectrum. It must be observed in the infrared portion of the spectrum. VY Canis Majoris' death nebula is ~4500 AU in width, about fifty times larger than the star itself and much larger than our solar system. Within the gas nebula is a smaller circumstellar dust region, which has a temperature of 760 K, and a width of approximately 260 AU. The star surface probably has a temperature around 3650 K, extremely cold for a star.
Unlike main sequence stars such as our Sun, VY Canis Majoris has no distinct photosphere and thus just trails off into space. Although it is the biggest known star, it is definitely not the most massive, partly because it has already ejected so much of its mass into the surrounding nebula.
Like all red giants and hypergiants, VY Canis Majoris is so big because it has exhausted all the hydrogen fuel in its core, and has begun fusing hydrogen on a shell outside of a helium core. In fact, VY Canis Majoris is so big that it can fuse together helium, lithium, and so on, all the way up the periodic table to iron and beyond. Eventually it will have a core made mainly of iron, just like the planets. The problem with post-iron fusion reactions is that they produce no energy, and hence cannot balance out the gravitational pressure generated by the star. When all the fusion fuel runs out, the star will collapse catastrophically in a supernova explosion and become a black hole.