Bye Week OT but very cool: First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System around a Sun-like Star Captured by ESO Telescope
Thought this was cool for those with an interest in astronomy.
The European Southern Observatory has taken the first ever image of a "young" star with 2 planets in orbit. This is the first time this has ever been observed and is about 310 light years away.
For context, what we see now is the image from 310 years ago.
On September 5, 1977 Voyager 1 left Earth and is currently 14 billion miles away traveling at approx. 38,026.77 mph. In "light time" it is 21 HOURS 27 MINUTES away. In 44 years and 1 month. This sun and it's planets are 310 light YEARS away. It takes about 37,200 years to travel one light year, we're looking at 11.5 million years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYC_8998-760-1
October 15th, 2021 at 11:33 AM ^
That is what I love about astronomy. It’s truly a form of time travel for me.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:17 PM ^
I remember taking Astronomy 101/102 at UM because I was really interested in learning more on the subject. Probably two of my more favorite classes in undergrad, and for anyone looking for some elective fillers, these were both great options. You'll learn a ton, and its all so interesting.
Like you said, gazing up at the stars may be the only form of time travel we can ever truly experience. Baffling to know that in many cases we are looking at stars as they appeared millions of years ago. Those things could've gone supernova and blown up by now, taking their entire solar systems with them, but we wouldn't know for sure until the light reflecting that actually gets here to Earth.
Hard not to feel truly awe-struck, and at the same time very insignificant, when thinking about astronomy.
October 15th, 2021 at 2:20 PM ^
We experience time travel every time we take a ride on an airplane. Time moves slower the faster we travel.
October 15th, 2021 at 6:40 PM ^
Oh yeah, time definitely moved slower on my 14 hour Chicago to Hong Kong flight in coach.
October 15th, 2021 at 5:43 PM ^
All my astronomy is self-taught. I have a Meade 12” goto S-C, CCD camera and all the gadgets you really, really shouldn’t buy…but do anyway. I spent hours at night just looking at some pretty amazing stuff. My enjoyment came from capturing deep sky objects, but just don’t have the patience for the photoshop stage. Unfortunately, I moved into town with lots of trees and light, so my scope sits in a box awaiting retirement.
October 15th, 2021 at 2:33 PM ^
Time travel isn't all it's cracked up to be.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:33 AM ^
Good sh*t Jedd!
October 15th, 2021 at 11:35 AM ^
It's crazy to think about how large the universe is. This system is 310 light years away. The Milky Way galaxy is *100,000* light years across. And then there are countless galaxies beyond the Milky Way. That star is "right around the block" in astronomical terms.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:40 AM ^
I don't think that I can truly comprehend the size of the universe. I watched a documentary on IMAX about the images that Hubble produced and left feeling very, very small (though not in a bad way).
October 15th, 2021 at 12:17 PM ^
The ridiculous thing - if earth were the size of a dime, the sun would be about 688 feet away. Pluto would be, on average, about 40 AU from earth, or 40 times the distance from earth to sun. That means Pluto would be about 5.2 miles from the earth dime.
The Oort cloud, which is about 1.5 light years from earth, would be about 12,400 miles away from the dime, or halfway around the world (circumference is about 24,900 miles).
At 310 light years away, this sun/planet system would be more than 2.5 MILLION miles away from the dime, or about 10.5 times the distance from the earth to the moon.
If earth were a dime.
October 15th, 2021 at 3:52 PM ^
This is what I needed. Just like you would read on r/explainlikeimfive.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:53 PM ^
Charles Woodson could still cover it.
October 15th, 2021 at 4:24 PM ^
To quote the beginning of Primo Levi's "A Tranquil Star," my favorite short story:
Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far from here, lived a peaceful star, which moved peacefully in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of peaceful planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:46 AM ^
The rocket propulsion technology requires a 9 month flight just to get to Mars. We'll need to do better than that for interstellar travel, like Star Trek technology and warp space. I hope it comes sooner than the middle of the 23rd century (LOL).
October 15th, 2021 at 12:24 PM ^
We just need to get that Stargate technology up an running.
October 15th, 2021 at 1:09 PM ^
We're potentially awash in energy at a quantum level, which if it could somehow be tapped would let you travel around without the need to carry fuel. The money quote from the attached Wikipedia link:
"Physicists Richard Feynman and John Wheeler calculated the zero-point radiation of the vacuum to be an order of magnitude greater than nuclear energy, with a single light bulb containing enough energy to boil all the world's oceans."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
October 15th, 2021 at 5:50 PM ^
"the vacuum holds the key to a full understanding of nature"
So...me stoned?
October 15th, 2021 at 3:59 PM ^
solar and wind power, solves everything haven't you heard?
October 15th, 2021 at 12:31 PM ^
It is so unbelievably huge. The human brain is not capable of comprehending how large it really is. That’s not to mention that we don’t know what’s beyond that. We have no way of knowing what’s beyond the observable universe. When you consider the size and what could be beyond that, it’s incredible to think about how limited we are as a species and how insignificant we are on the grand scale.
I once heard an analogy:
Milky Way galaxy : the entire universe :: one photon : Milky Way galaxy
or something like that
October 15th, 2021 at 3:18 PM ^
IIRC, if you squeezed the Entire solar sytem down to the size of a quarter... the milky way would be the size of
the continential US
October 15th, 2021 at 3:40 PM ^
The human brain is not capable of comprehending how large it really is.
This is basically fact, not opinion. The Hubble Deep Field is what really drives that home for me.
Picture a tennis ball 350 feet in the air and how much sky it takes up. The Hubble Deep Field covers that much of the sky. In the picture are 3,000 galaxies.
October 15th, 2021 at 10:22 PM ^
"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork"
-Psalm 19:1
October 15th, 2021 at 11:38 AM ^
I bet i can throw this football over that star...... coach would have put me in the fourth quarter, we'd have been state champions. no doubt, no doubt in my mind.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:39 AM ^
The Millennium Falcon can get there in less than 12 parsecs. :)
Very cool - hopefully humanity can survive long enough to develop the technology to check out some of these places in the long-term future.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:52 AM ^
I never caught the distance of the Cassell run. Guess, we didn't need to know except it was REALLY FAST.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:03 PM ^
Kessel run ;)
October 15th, 2021 at 1:37 PM ^
Indeed, a hard one to spell and I watched the Han Solo movie. My bad.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:04 PM ^
Parsecs is actually distance and not speed. The Solo movie even though it wasn't great did a decent job of making that statement make sense years after the fact.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:25 PM ^
The Solo movie was better than any of the new trilogy, in my opinion. I went into it wanting to hate it and came out really liking it.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:42 PM ^
Wasn't a big fan of any of the new trilogies. I've only really liked Rogue One of the recent vintages. I wanted to love Solo, especially with Donald Glover absolutely killing it, but I couldn't get past the dude the cast for Han. I really think they could have had something with that ending but that actor killed any chance.
October 15th, 2021 at 2:01 PM ^
I thought Solo sucked. I really, really liked Rogue One. That is right up with Empire Strikes Back.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:09 PM ^
Han made the Kessell Run in ~39.12 light years in length. It's 12 parsecs, and 1 parsec is ~3.26 light years - so the math is easy enough for me to do it! Keep in mind that a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. The way hyperspace jumps in Star Wars works is that he was jumping through 'shortcuts' in space-time that were somewhat hazardous.
October 15th, 2021 at 1:03 PM ^
I like the way Guardians of the Galaxy depicts their hyperspace jumps:
October 15th, 2021 at 1:47 PM ^
Cool stuff! I always knew that a parsec is a unit of length. It remains difficult to understand how much time it took for Han to complete the Kessel Run, knowing that he took shortcuts in space-time. In other words, it was a long wait for Han to deliver that cargo.
October 15th, 2021 at 2:51 PM ^
It's unclear how fast lightspeed travel actually is, particularly since there's no consistency throughout the Star Wars "universe" (by which I mean the body of Star Wars works (movies, books, games, etc.), not the Star Wars galaxy). It's probably longer than minutes, but is it hours? Days? The movies are probably best interpreted on the whole as suggesting hours--it's one thing to be on a star destroyer or even the Millennium Falcon, where there are places to sleep, use the bathroom, etc., but it's a little implausible to think about being stuck in an X-Wing for a days long journey. But even the movies leave plenty of doubt. Consider Han's 12 parsec comment; if lightspeed travel takes hours, Han cut what, two hours off the Kessel Run? Big deal. Things like that only make sense if lightspeed takes significantly longer. And I've played at least one Star Wars game where it takes months of in-game time to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other.
So TL;DR, nobody really knows how far Star Wars travel is...
October 15th, 2021 at 12:12 PM ^
Kessel*
October 15th, 2021 at 12:06 PM ^
I hope Elon Musk, Bezos and Richard Branson enjoy themselves in their new worlds....
October 15th, 2021 at 12:14 PM ^
They're going to make The Outer Worlds prophetic, aren't they?
October 15th, 2021 at 11:40 AM ^
Space, Bitches. Space
October 15th, 2021 at 11:42 AM ^
can any of those planets play DT? intergalactic transfer portal - time to get busy.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:43 AM ^
Incredible that we can still receive signals from the Voyager craft, which are almost 50 years old and nearly a light-day away, yet my cell phone, built in 2020, still drops Wifi and cell signal semi-regularly
October 15th, 2021 at 11:43 AM ^
Oops, double post.
To make it worthwhile, I'll echo what others have said - the size and scope of the Universe in incomprehensible. I cannot even put the distances and speeds into context. 310 light-years is close? Yeah okay. I'm in awe.
October 15th, 2021 at 11:44 AM ^
what we see now is the image from 310 years ago.
So basically we're seeing a photo from the moment right after Michigan State last won a football national championship
October 15th, 2021 at 11:46 AM ^
That's a really cool picture from an Earth-based telescope, and kind of surprising that it hasn't been seen before. Astronomy is so cool... Maybe we can turn Hubble on it now and get some even better closeups?
The kind of stuff that the James Webb Space Telescope will search the hell out of when it finally gets to it's L2 orbit is the stuff that piques my interest. I can't wait for that thing to finally launch and deploy itself without issues. Images from the very beginning of time will be simply fascinating!
October 15th, 2021 at 3:22 PM ^
was gonna say, if we can do this with Earth based telescopes and the Hubble (almost 50 years old in terms of development asd design), then the JWST will be amazing indeed.
if they every get it up (TWSS)
October 15th, 2021 at 11:46 AM ^
These distances and time are just such huge numbers. That is why I think it is plausible that there is "life" elsewhere in the Universe, but it is just not possible for there to be alien visitation to Earth because the time and distances are too great. For this sun and planet, 310 years is outside the lifespan of any organism on Earth, and nothing can travel at light speed except electromagnetic waves. It is just not feasible for any aliens to be able to travel here to Earth. But logic has never stopped people from their beliefs/conspiracy theories.
October 15th, 2021 at 12:04 PM ^
Your logic is based on a myopic human viewpoint in a point-in-time scenario. To dismiss potential alien intelligence millions of years ahead us is dangerous. We cannot understand what we won’t accept.