Solar System

[Drone]

 

[Drone]

 

[lexluthermiester]

This was interesting.

 

[Drone]

 

[Drone]

The stunning arch of the Milky Way stretches across the Chilean night sky, accompanied by the Magellanic Clouds on the left and admired from the control building of ESO’s Paranal Observatory, home to the Very Large Telescope (VLT).

This image, taken from aboard the ISS, shows the aurora australis as it streams across the Earth's atmosphere as the station orbited 271 miles above the southern Indian Ocean in between Asia and Antarctica.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features AFGL 5180, a beautiful stellar nursery located in the constellation of Gemini. At the center of the image, a massive star is forming and blasting cavities through the clouds with a pair of powerful jets, extending to the top right and bottom left of the image. Light from this star is mostly escaping and reaching us by illuminating these cavities, like a lighthouse piercing through the storm clouds.

 

[Drone]

Astronomers Find a ‘Break’ in One of the Milky Way’s Spiral Arms - NASA

The newly discovered feature offers insight into the large-scale structure of our galaxy, which is difficult to study from Earth’s position inside it.

www.nasa.gov

 

[Drone]

Perseverance's Navigation Camera Captures Sample Borehole​

 

[Drone]

This picture shows data from NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), launched in 2009 under the moniker WISE.
The object in the bottom left corner is a brown dwarf officially named WISEA J153429.75-104303.3 and nicknamed “The Accident.”

 

[pyrotenax]

Enceladus the sixth-largest moon of Saturn ...

Below is tiny Enceladus and and to its left an even smaller tiny spec of Epimetheus with the giant Saturn in the background ...

 

[ARF]

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is coming. It's the largest ever detected - around 150 km wide and will be closest to the Sun in 2031.

One of the largest comets ever seen is headed our way (nationalgeographic.com)

 

[lexluthermiester]

This was a very interesting video:

 

[Space Lynx]

This was a very interesting video:

I still don't understand how that New Horizons spacecraft can escape the gravity of the giant sun. It says it will run out of energy in 2038... its just sooo tiny and thrust is so small... I thought gravity/orbit pull in from the sun would be greater than that. I know its lesser the further you go, but still. I don't get it, lol

just finished video, it was good thanks for sharing

 

[lexluthermiester]

I still don't understand how that New Horizons spacecraft can escape the gravity of the giant sun. It says it will run out of energy in 2038... its just sooo tiny and thrust is so small... I thought gravity/orbit pull in from the sun would be greater than that. I know its lesser the further you go, but still. I don't get it, lol

The key is, it's so far out and moving so fast that it easily overpowers the pull of gravity at that range. Gravity is a tricky and sometimes very unintuitive force of physics.

 

[the54thvoid]

Gravity is a tricky and sometimes very unintuitive force of physics.

It's very peculiar indeed (link is mostly paywalled).

Gravity mysteries: Why is gravity so weak?

Gravity acts over vast distances, but why is it such a weak force? More: Seven things that don't make sense about gravity Take a moment to try a jump into the air. Have you ever thought about how remarkable it is that so little effort is required to jump a few inches off the ground. …

www.newscientist.com

Gravity is a real weakling – 10 to the power 40 times weaker than the electromagnetic force that holds atoms together

 

[lexluthermiester]

Exactly right. Gravity is very weak indeed.

 

[Space Lynx]

I suppose the reason gravity doesn't feel weak to me cause of my spinal cord issues I have, it sure kicks my ass quite often

but yes if I zoom out, your logic makes sense in outer space. so amazing to think where Voyager is now, what the solar system looks like to Voyager right now... so beautiful, its existence - proof of our manifestation - even if the sun exploded tomorrow, that manifestation most likely will carry some of our story as a self-aware species to the end times...

does entropy exist in outer space? or will voyager simply live forever with no deterioration (assuming it stays far enough away from stars radiation and doesn't hit anything) @Drone

 

[Space Lynx]

any idea why this comet is green in our solar system? certain kinds of dust can produce different colors??? I am confused

Exotic green comet not seen since stone age returns to skies above Earth

Comet C/2022 E3, which orbits the sun every 50,000 years, will be closest to us next Wednesday and Thursday

www.theguardian.com

]

Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon – pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together – in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.\

I still don't understand how this can be, why don't we see a bunch of different colored comets then?

 

[Space Lynx]

If we ever detect tritium (radio frequency 1516.701 detects it) in our solar system (its never been checked) we could be almost sure there is alien probe that has been here. quite interesting watch here:

 

[the54thvoid]

If we ever detect tritium (radio frequency 1516.701 detects it) in our solar system (its never been checked) we could be almost sure there is alien probe that has been here. quite interesting watch here:

I initially marked this as Low Quality, mostly because the text must misrepresent the video. Tritium exists on earth and in our atmosphere. It is used in scientific and other fields; and as earth is part of the solar system, Tritium does exist and has been measured, at least on Earth.

Further, as much as SETI is cool, it's proven nothing in decades, apart from that space seems very empty of noise.

And to keep this thread where it's meant to be, we're not disussing the search for alien life here. This is about the wonders of the solar system, and what we know within, and where our research is going.

 

[lexluthermiester]

To be fair, it greatly depends on the isotope of Tritium in question. While some isotopes of Tritium exist naturally in our home star system and even here on Earth, the referenced isotope does not and is completely synthetic, thus if we found it here, we would know that a technologically advanced civilization other than ourselves had been here a some point in the past and left it behind. This is not tin hat stuff and is an important aspect of the science we do in our star system.

We are actively, and in earnest, looking for legitimate signs of techno-signatures not created by ourselves here in the Solar System. It's a very real and serious aspect of astronomical science being conducted.

 

[Space Lynx]

This might be a very elementary question about the planets in our solar system, and if it is well then so be it. However, I am very curious, with the latest JWST image of Neptune,

Why do some planets form like this with massive amounts of methane, and others have too much iron oxide (like Mars I think, but I may be wrong on that, but my overall point still stands)... like how, Earth is basically multiple collisions of materials from asteroids, comets, multiple large objects crashing into each other to form this perfect medley to allow for life. Where the fuck did Neptune get all its methane? Why is it just out there in middle of nowhere, why was not some of it taken by Pluto, is there something inherently built into physics, that when a mass of say methane becomes large enough, it attracts more of the same stuff mostly? Outside of gravity of course... I am speaking of like at the atomic level...

I don't know, I just don't get it.


In other news, this new image from JWST is breathaking. Honestly, how is this inherently built into physics to look so damn perfect? It's so beautiful. Man, sometimes I envy humans of the past, being in so touch with the stars, and so much of our culture now doesn't even care. Truly mind boggling in itself, but that is another story.

 

[Ahhzz]

This might be a very elementary question about the planets in our solar system, and if it is well then so be it. However, I am very curious, with the latest JWST image of Neptune,

View attachment 290867

Why do some planets form like this with massive amounts of methane, and others have too much iron oxide (like Mars I think, but I may be wrong on that, but my overall point still stands)... like how, Earth is basically multiple collisions of materials from asteroids, comets, multiple large objects crashing into each other to form this perfect medley to allow for life. Where the fuck did Neptune get all its methane? Why is it just out there in middle of nowhere, why was not some of it taken by Pluto, is there something inherently built into physics, that when a mass of say methane becomes large enough, it attracts more of the same stuff mostly? Outside of gravity of course... I am speaking of like at the atomic level...

I don't know, I just don't get it.


In other news, this new image from JWST is breathaking. Honestly, how is this inherently built into physics to look so damn perfect? It's so beautiful. Man, sometimes I envy humans of the past, being in so touch with the stars, and so much of our culture now doesn't even care. Truly mind boggling in itself, but that is another story.

I thought this was a pic of Uranus?

 

[Space Lynx]

I thought this was a pic of Uranus?

ah yes, you are correct, my bad. well my question still stands, just with different chemical makeups.

for example, why do we have so much water? netpune so much methane, wouldn't the asteroid/comet permeation/distrubution have been more varied/random than that? Let's say all the planets were eons ago all smashed together back and forth, is there something inherently built into physics, where methane clings to more methane, and so on and so forth? Is that how they were all shaped? I don't know, my head hurts. I just don't get it, why its distributed like this.

From NASA's website "Uranus gets its blue-green color from methane gas in the atmosphere. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere and is reflected back out by Uranus' cloud tops."

I can't seem to find the percentile make up of each planet, google has failed me. I just don't understand why the distribution worked out so well for Earth. Seems strange to me.

 

[dont whant to set it"']

I thought this was a pic of Uranus?

Did it not get renamed as "Urectum", oh that is hundreds of years away.

 

[lexluthermiester]

This might be a very elementary question about the planets in our solar system, and if it is well then so be it. However, I am very curious, with the latest JWST image of Neptune,

Um, that photo is not Neptune. It's Uranus. Neptune is more blue and, most importantly, it's ring are aligned with the planetary plane, more or less. The rings of Uranus are shown as such because of the planet rotating on a 81.2degree axis.

I thought this was a pic of Uranus?

It is.

I can't seem to find the percentile make up of each planet, google has failed me.

That's not a failure of Google or you. Not a lot is known for certain. Most of the chemical analysis for the outer planets is best-guess based on spectral observations. More exploration is needed to learn more detail.