Weird space stuff.

Dr Brian Cox, late of mid 90's pop band D:Ream and current physics-monger of choice for the BBC, has just informed me that the planet Venus rotates on its axis once every 243 days.

Which, given its relative position in our solar system, means that its days are longer than its years.

Read that again and think about it.

Days longer than years......

Hard to get your head round.

In't space brilliant....?

Cool.
And how long are it's years?
So in real terms, if you were on the planet, or if the earth was the same then it would be dawn for about 60 days, daylight for 60 days, dusk for 60 days and dark for 60 days. I think I could live with that.
Actually, thinking about it, depending on the direction of the rotation on its axis compared to its orbital direction it could be full day light on one side of the planet practically all year round...
Erm... I might have to have someone explain this to me better.

Breadman . http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4cgQNUhtmHM

I quite like astronomy so I actually knew that fact about Venus.

To be honest it is simply impossible for us (me anyway) to get your head around the magnitude of it - the only 'grasp' they can find to measure it is how fast light can travel in a year - then with that in mind try to comprehend distances such as something known as z8_GND_5296 (a galaxy) is 13 BILLION light years away! (to put that into some context, our solar system (The Sun, earth, mars, the moon etc, etc) is thought to be 4.5 billion years old - so that is us developing from a big gas cloud to what we've all become today - then starting from scratch and doing it all over again, then again starting from scratch and doing all again for the third time!

And if that isn't enough that galaxy z8... is 13 billion light years away in ONE direction from the earth. If we looked in the direct opposite direction we probably can see another 12 or 13 billion light years away as well - 25/6 billion light years from end to end - and the universe is not only still expanding - its expanding at a faster rate too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z8_GND_5296

The scientist reckon there are ten times more stars than GRAINS of sand on the earth -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3085885.stm

BUT if you think that is jaw droping then just try to get your head around the very, very, very, very small stuff of Quantum mechanics.

Believe me (or don't) this is where the future of mankind is.

It's stuff that simply does not make any sense to how we currently understand things - by all that we know it shouldn't even exist - but it does.

Things like you can be in TWO places at once.  Things don't exist until you measure them.  The more accurate you measure stuff on one axis, the less accurate it becomes on the other axis.

Even Einstein could not understand it and was proved wrong about it.

Niels Bohr was the one who first got some sort of a handle on it and even after nearly a century of trying to understand things we really aren't that much further on.

Mind blowing stuff on both the astronomically big and microscopically small scales.

Fascinating the both of them to me.

Proper shock and awe stuff!

Not really that hard to understand .

scottjames30 wrote:Not really that hard to understand .

Pretty simple stuff really,women are a much harder subject to get your head around, take Nat for example, who the feck could work that one out.

scottjames30 wrote:Not really that hard to understand .

I know very little about Space apart from the fact that it is 'up there'. If X days makes a year, how is the day longer than the year? Non-technical terms please. Pretend I'm under a Coconut tree smoking a spliff and surfing the forum on my trusty Nokia 3310.

A year is the length of time it takes a planet to complete one orbit of the sun.


A day is the length of time it takes a planet to complete one full rotation on its axis.

Hope that helps. 

The thought that the universe may have always existed and not had a beginning is another theory that boggers the mind. 

Don't get me started in on the multiverse theory either.

Hipster_Nebula wrote:The thought that the universe may have always existed and not had a beginning is another theory that boggers the mind. 

Don't get me started in on the multiverse theory either.

God created the universe.

I bet you have a lot of space in your dark hole, don't you Nat!

The whole universe is something mankind will never ever be able to figure out or even quantify. There are approximately 275 million Stars born every single day. How do you keep up with that?

On another note, the theory that we could travel forward in time (backwards just not possible) is something I find fascinating as well. All you need to do is build a vehicle that can travel close to the speed of light and you could travel hundreds, even thousands of years into the future. Far fetched for a vehicle to be able to be manufactured for such a feat I know, but over a good few hundred years of advancing technology, who knows what will become. Won't be in our lifetime but maybe one day.

Natasha Whittam wrote:

Hipster_Nebula wrote:The thought that the universe may have always existed and not had a beginning is another theory that boggers the mind. 

Don't get me started in on the multiverse theory either.

God created the universe.

Oh yeah. Forgot about that.

A soup can full of neutron star material would have more mass than the moon.

Breadman wrote:A year is the length of time it takes a planet to complete one orbit of the sun.


A day is the length of time it takes a planet to complete one full rotation on its axis.

Hope that helps. 

This cleared it up nicely, thanks. I overlooked the definitions of day and year in favour of the Earth-based relation between the two. Totally reasonable.

We're going to be made extinct by a planet that may or may not exist apparently. Planet 9 cometh. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/planet-nine-mysterious-planet-is-to-blame-for-mass-extinctions-of-life-on-earth-scientist-claims-a6959776.html

Fuck me.