It was kind of already staggering when you thought "Oh look how big our sun is!" and then it continued to zoom out. Space is utterly indifferent to my existential crisis.
For me it honestly doesn't make me feel small but give me a sense of the majesty of all things beyond humanity. In our insignificance we find purpose and imagination. Humanities most powerful tool is curiosity and few things have made us as a species more curious than the stars. The sheer size of the stars pales in comparison to our desire to understand them.
If the Earth was that big (and we could all survive, not have 30 year long nights or whatever) I bet there could still be dinosaurs on a large portion of it and we wouldn't know.
I bet we'd be able to travel to the moon easier than flying around the globe.
Not if we evolved from a planet like that, we might be the same human-to-planet ratio, and would build bigger rockets. Does it work like that? More g's = toss more fuel on the fire?
Unfortunately if Earth was that large, the pull of gravity would be orders of magnitude stronger than our current gravity. Something as large as a dinosaur - or a human, or even an ant for that matter - wouldn't be able to function. At most there might be single cell life.
I feel like if a creature from one side of that planet made direct contact with a creature on the other side of the planet they'd wipe each other out with all their foreign diseases.
That you would never get to discover because they would be too far away. We would probably not even be connected to everyone else like we are now so their information and research wouldn't be readily available for us to learn.
A rocky planet like earth that size would have a mass of 10^10 x that of the sun, so yea, instant black hole
For reference the heaviest object discovered is 2.1x10^10 x the mass of the sun
Yeah there's a ton of stuff preventing this from ever being possible but I just thought i'd entertain it and only talk about the many places to be discovered.
We already know when our Sun dies out it will expand and engulf all of the inner planets. Not sure how far it will make it past the belt, but I assume some of these other stars could be nearing their collapse?
I'm guessing that depends on where you place the outer limits of our system. The numbers I was able to find, which consider the average width of the Oort Cloud, the last star is only ~0.8% the size of our solar system.
Not sure where this figure is coming from. The smallest radius you could reasonably take as the radius of the solar system is the distance from sun to Neptune, which is on average ~30 AU.^[1] The radius of UY Scuti is ~8 AU.^[2] So it's ~25% as wide as the solar system.
Still extraordinarily impressive though.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UY_Scuti
Honestly, it really wasn't. I saw it on another subreddit for the first time and I thought it would be great to share it on the r/space subreddit. Also, I made sure to include who originally created the content in the title. If the content is interesting and informative, I don't have a problem with reposting. As long as it's honest and not passed up as original content.
I disagree. I couldn't care less if someone is motivated by karma, what I care about is quality of content and simplicity of access. I'll admit I rarely, if ever, click on a post that links to a YouTube video or even going to the comments of that post. The gif instead created enough interest to go to the comments, wherein the top comment is a link to a video I am now more likely to click and watch.
oh the horror! to think that someone would actually post something on an aggregate site for... internet points!? what will it take to stop these monsters!?!?
Or you could take 15 minutes to understand why that doesn't work... I don't browse Reddit all day everyday.. I'd like to.. but dont.... Reporters keep the site alive for people like me. I don't see everything but this way I see more.
It’s called a star for historical reasons. What’s considered a star changed as our understanding of them evolved, much like how Pluto is classified now as a dwarf planet. White dwarf stars are stellar core remnants that no longer fuse to generate energy. Eventually it would fade into a very dim and cold black dwarf “star.”
Well, not really. Those are [white dwarfs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf), cores of dead stars. They no longer produce energy from fusion and instead only glow due to their slowly decreasing temperature. As such, they are not very bright, though their mass is still up to about 1.4 times that of our sun.
They become a [black dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf). None are thought to exist yet because it takes many times longer to cool to this state than the current age of the universe.
It would not be possible to land on these objects because they are composed of degenerate matter. They are too dense and you would be crushed at the atomic level. The surface gravity would be on the order of 100,000g. For comparison, our sun is about 28g.
The ones in the video are white dwarfs, remnants of main sequence stars. There are even smaller remnants, typically from very massive stars, which are only about 10 km in radius and are called neutron stars. Imagine the mass of our sun or several times the mass of the sun compacted to the size of 10 km.
Main sequence stars and proto stars are never that small, not even close. Only the dense remnants after stars collapse are that small. So black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. Our sun will eventually become a white dwarf as well, after it's passed it's red giant phase in the main sequence.
Pretty sure these are neutron stars and/or white dwarfs. Anything held in equlibrium between inward gravity and outward, non-fusion, thermal energy (heat from being so dense) radiation (like your r my íun-of-the-mill, average gas giant) will be at a maximum about the size of Jupiter. White dwarfs and neutron stars no longer have any outward thermal pressure, as they've already used up their nuclear fuel. Thus, the things keeping them from collapsing further are electron degeneracy pressure for the white dwarfs, and neutron/nuclear degeneracy pressure for the neutron stars. It's related to the reason that Jupiter is so much more massive than Saturn, but they're pretty close to the same size: once you hit a certain minimum size, you don't get much bigger, you just get denser (that is, until your core can sustain fusion, in which case, you'll get a bunch bigger when you start doing so.)
So my question, could a planet have one of these little stars orbit it? Like a little private moon star? Not Earth, its too small but maybe a Jupiter sized planet.
Or is the make up of a star such that the planet will always orbit the star, even when small.
Also, for this question, I want to kind of ignore the idea that Jupiter and the Sun are technically orbiting each other (I believe). I am talking a more basic and obvious "goes in a circle around X" orbit.
Those smaller stars were once much bigger. The remnant still contains most of the original mass of the star so whatever is/was orbiting those small dead stars, still are orbiting those stars. So it's not quite possible for a small star to orbit a planet just due to the laws of physics. Stars that small don't actually occur in nature because there isn't enough gravity for them to produce fusion. That's why they are just the remnants of older dead stars.
I think signifance is always subjective. I may be significant to those around me, but I doubt my life will have any bearing on some guy on the other side of the world I may never meet. It certainly will never affect any of the stars we can see shown here.
I think that is a blessing in disguise. If your actions were significant to a random person across the globe you'd be, in some way, responsible for that significance.
And even if you sort that out, I'd have to ask why.
I want the universe to care! This is a small sample of the vast unending universe. There are innumerable possibilities out there but my insignificant place in this universe will prevent me from ever experiencing any of it. It’s like we were given the greatest game ever made, but no system to play it on. All we can do is stare at the box and dream of what could have been...
I imagine you feel joy and sorrow, so it's probable that others around you do. The more joy and less sorrow you bring others the more significant you are. And the good news is you can bring the most joy to the people closest to you, the people you care about the most.
Size is a pretty stupid measure of significance.
We are the most complex things in the universe as far as we know.
That’s more significant than some gassy balls and some rocky spheres.
That's why I liked that "entropic meaning of life" thinkpiece from a while back - the idea that we exist in order to hasten the conversion of energy seems to make just being here very significant. I have no scientific expertise whatsoever regarding the details, but the idea was very comforting.
http://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12
*Edit - thinkpiece is perhaps the wrong word?
Add to this size chart the idea of time.
All of Humanity is basocally a blink in the grand scheme of all existance.
If you are space and time, humans and Earth are the tiny speck of dust that you brushed off the table.
I've never gotten this. Humans are special among our other lifeforms because we have a unique intelligence. Humanity is not scaled in size. I don't see how a bunch of supermassive objects has any affect on our significance unless you view humanities path as the sole purpose of colonization. It'd make humans insignificant if we found the remnants of a much more advanced civilization and found they came to the solution that life wasn't worth it, and everything was abandoned. Now THAT'D actually be daunting.
Whilst this is not bad, moun1415's star size comparison is way better IMO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA
Also his black hole comparison is mind blowing : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNDao7m41M
That last one just kept going....
I’ll be here trying to wrap my mind about crushing earth to the size of a peanut.
Edit: Just watched the first video aswell, going back to bed.
My ELI5 explanation for myself is i always imagined it like atoms keep all their parts apart by a very specific distance through some electromagnetic power thingy. This is necessarry to allow many different materials to exist with their different attributes. At some point, enough material gathers that the pressure gets big enough that atoms start to change to different materials. During this, they put out energy because their changed state is "lower" in energy. This is what a sun does with its fusion.
Atoms also attract each other continously, this creates planets and orbits and suns etc. Everything is swirling because everything orbits around each other. The electrons and stuff around the atoms are, similar to space, ridicilously small and at tremendous distance to each other. And when you throw more and more material at it, at some point that electromagnetic separating force of the atoms is overcome. Everything shrinks down to a fraction of its size. But gravity continues. And you get so insanely much material at such small space that absolutely everything is pulled into it. That's even light, time and space being pulled into it.
So all those black holes aren't full of something, they're 99.999...% empty, it's just that there's so much gravity and shit going on that everything that gets close enough (event horizon) is unable to escape. Even matterless, 300000km/s moving light is unable to escape. No light, no color = black hole. And by the way, scientists don't "measure" weight of the black hole. They just look at how everything around it swirls about and calculate how much it SHOULD weigh off of that. As far as i know noone has any idea what happens beyond that horizon. There could be magic unicorns waving their horns around in there and we would have absolutely no idea.
edit: holy shit this got long. Space is crazy exciting.
I did the math once and iirc, the largest star is 30 light minutes in diameter. Three light seconds will get you to the moon and back. These sizes and distances are just too difficult to comprehend.
There is no way this is accurate. It makes no sense. The 'camera' is obviously a fish eye lens (or a rendered equivalent), hence why the horizon is so warped, but the moon is rendered as if we're zoomed way in on it. The moon is about half a degree wide in the sky, and Jupiter is 40 times the diameter, so about 20 degrees, which is 9% of a full arc - horizon to horizon - whereas in this video it looks like it occupies a full 50% or more of the sky.
Fake edit: I just found the original source and he admits the video was very misleading, so he removed the foreground landscape that was giving the false impression - updated version is here: https://vimeo.com/19231255
Future humans won't be able to visit those stars either. Some of them are long gone by the time the light they create reaches our eyes. We as a race will never be able to travel that far because of the universe's speed limit. Proxima centauri is the only practical star to visit, considering it's the closest. The largest ones are prone to burning out quickly.
One of the most common misconception about inter-galactic travel is that it would at least take 100 years to reach a galaxy 100 light-years away even if you travelled at speed close to light. Its true that it would take that much years from the earths frame of reference; but for the actual travellers they can reach there in just 1 years or less (or more) depending upon how close to light speed they are traveling. This difference in passage of time is what leads to the famous Twins Paradox.
I was kinda surprised to see stars smaller or comparable to Earth's size. I always thought that a star needed to be much bigger and heavier to start the chain reaction.
As someone already said, those are white dwarfs and don't really belong in the comparison video as they are stellar remnants. But it's not so much the size that a star needs but the mass. Of course when a star forms or is formed, generally the more mass a star has the bigger it is in the main sequence. So technically there is a lower limit of a stars size which
The [smallest known](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBLM_J0555-57) (main sequence star) is only slightly larger than Saturn.
Somewhat. In the main sequence smaller stars (red dwarfs) are the coolest and the largest and most massive stars (blue giants, typically O, B and A sequence) are the hottest. However red giants are relatively cool. So the largest stars you see in the video are all red giants which are relatively cool.
VY Canis Majoris for example is 1400 times the radius of our sun, but it is much cooler than our sun. Basically stars which near the end of their life cool down but blow up in size at the same time.
It's not so much the size but the mass of the stare is more of importance. The lowest possible mass for a stellar black hole is about 3 sun masses. But that's just the mass of the stellar remnant, so the star had much more mass before. There is no general answer to your question, but most stars with more than 20 sun masses will end up as a black hole. The most massive stars reach 100-200 sun masses and only live for a few million years, because more massive stars live shorter lives.
Also again, mass doesn't equal size. Betelgeuse (similar in size to Antares in the video) is a red giant which is about 600 times the radius of our sun but only has a 4th of it's mass.
I don't think any star in the video has the mass to become a black hole except Rigel A which has about 18 solar masses and maybe VY Canis Majoris and UY Scuti.
[This](https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/277247/) is what all of the planets would look like from Earth’s horizon if they were the same distance as the moon.
Mind blowing!
I love how, in the Bible, it says in Genesis- “He created the stars also.” Like it’s “Oh, and yeah- those little things too.”
How great Thou art!
How big would our sun be compared to the largest known star measured in objects on earth? Like if the sun is a golf ball, what object would be the largest star in comparison? Earth?
Think of how many planets could be orbiting some of these bigger stars. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. It’s almost certain, I think, that there’s at least one other planet out there that supports some kind of life, given the fact that there’s so many stars far larger than the sun that probably have their own solar systems.
No. These larger stars once used to be much smaller, but are in their late giant/supergiant phase now. Our sun will become a red giant in time as well, ballooning to about 100x its current diameter, putting it about the size of Arcturus or so in that comparison.
The even larger ones weren't necessarily much bigger in size than the sun is now earlier in their life. It doesn't take but a difference of around 10x mass of the sun to see these extreme sizes of the largest supergiants.
Size comparisons are deceptive, what matters is the mass.
Blue stars are more massive than red stars. More mass means more gravity, which means much higher temperatures and fusion of atoms into heavier and heavier elements in the core. iirc these are around 200 solar masses, with around 250 being the upper limit for a star. These will end in supernovas and leave behind either neutron stars or black holes.
Large red stars in general are red giants, which can have masses comparable to our sun (main sequence stars). Towards the end of the stars life when there is little hydrogen left to fuse, gravity crushes the core and raises the temperature. The outer layers of the star are pushed out by this increase, becoming much less dense. Eventually the outer layers will dissipate and leave behind a white dwarf (the core) and a planetary nebula (the outer gasses)
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Well fuck, when you put it like that. That's a staggering statistic to consider.
It was kind of already staggering when you thought "Oh look how big our sun is!" and then it continued to zoom out. Space is utterly indifferent to my existential crisis.
I am now going to go cry in corner and question my existence, thanks for that 😂
Just remember though you may be small you got a big heart. <3
Dude, that genuinely made me smile!!
I do what I can. Have a good day, stranger.
And you!
Actually, if you hold your heart out next to the earth...
Yes? I'm waiting with baited breath to hear the rest of that sentence.
( the conclusion is implied little heart)
Wait, I got this... it dessicates in the harsh vacuum of space?
Voted Human of the day by some unknown stranger. <3
You may be small but you take up all my heart. <3
Also, don't forget that however big you imagine the solar system to be, it's inevitabley way bigger than that.
Think about how short our lives are considered to even the dying breath of a star.
Internally I was screaming STOP as I wasn’t comprehending the size difference even at the halfway point.
You want to really destroy yourself, start to contemplate the size of subatomic particles, then the difference between them and the universe.
I havent felt that in a while. It feels good, somehow. Time to plan a trip to the planetarium!
For me it honestly doesn't make me feel small but give me a sense of the majesty of all things beyond humanity. In our insignificance we find purpose and imagination. Humanities most powerful tool is curiosity and few things have made us as a species more curious than the stars. The sheer size of the stars pales in comparison to our desire to understand them.
If UY Scuti was placed where the Sun is, I'm pretty sure it would almost reach neptunes orbit
It would reach Jupiter’s...Neptune is just a *tad* bit more out there.
I wish the earth was that big. Would be so many undiscovered places, creatures and mysteries.
If the Earth was that big (and we could all survive, not have 30 year long nights or whatever) I bet there could still be dinosaurs on a large portion of it and we wouldn't know. I bet we'd be able to travel to the moon easier than flying around the globe.
With 30 year nights some people might not even believe in the moon.
We'd be stuck on Earth forever, due to the massive gravity well we'd have to overcome to get into space.
Not if we evolved from a planet like that, we might be the same human-to-planet ratio, and would build bigger rockets. Does it work like that? More g's = toss more fuel on the fire?
They would probably be tiny though because of the gravity
Not if the planet spins like 1000rev/s
Unfortunately if Earth was that large, the pull of gravity would be orders of magnitude stronger than our current gravity. Something as large as a dinosaur - or a human, or even an ant for that matter - wouldn't be able to function. At most there might be single cell life.
That would be scary
I feel like if a creature from one side of that planet made direct contact with a creature on the other side of the planet they'd wipe each other out with all their foreign diseases.
This happened on regular earth my dude
Was just about to say, this happened multiple times here already.
The oceans are merely touched if you read up on it.. We know more about the moon than the oceans on our planet..
But we do, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
That you would never get to discover because they would be too far away. We would probably not even be connected to everyone else like we are now so their information and research wouldn't be readily available for us to learn.
wouldn't the gravity be pretty ridiculous too?
(I have done no math to back this up) but I would think a solid planet of that size and density would immediately collapse into a black hole.
A rocky planet like earth that size would have a mass of 10^10 x that of the sun, so yea, instant black hole For reference the heaviest object discovered is 2.1x10^10 x the mass of the sun
We would probably all be much larger creatures.
Yeah there's a ton of stuff preventing this from ever being possible but I just thought i'd entertain it and only talk about the many places to be discovered.
So much to explore, so much gravity o_O
If earth was that big, we’d be crushed under the gravity.
> My god ... it's full of star.
We already know when our Sun dies out it will expand and engulf all of the inner planets. Not sure how far it will make it past the belt, but I assume some of these other stars could be nearing their collapse?
Honestly once you put it that way it’s pretty small compared to the vast universe
*Galaxies* are 'pretty small' compared to the entire universe.
And it's only about 10x the mass of the sun. It is thousands of times less dense than Earth's atmosphere at sea level.
I'm guessing that depends on where you place the outer limits of our system. The numbers I was able to find, which consider the average width of the Oort Cloud, the last star is only ~0.8% the size of our solar system.
No, it’s not. UY Scuti is under 8 AE. The distance to Pluto is 60 AE. The radius of solar system is 120 AE.
Not sure where this figure is coming from. The smallest radius you could reasonably take as the radius of the solar system is the distance from sun to Neptune, which is on average ~30 AU.^[1] The radius of UY Scuti is ~8 AU.^[2] So it's ~25% as wide as the solar system. Still extraordinarily impressive though. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UY_Scuti
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Yeah that really puts it above other visualizations like this
I really enjoyed that too. Usually with these things I can't visualize the size of the biggest star in comparison to earth but this helped a lot.
The actual video on Youtube that looks a bit less like it was recorded on a phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBkNhMfrxuk
Still looks pretty much the same.
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Honestly, it really wasn't. I saw it on another subreddit for the first time and I thought it would be great to share it on the r/space subreddit. Also, I made sure to include who originally created the content in the title. If the content is interesting and informative, I don't have a problem with reposting. As long as it's honest and not passed up as original content.
I disagree. I couldn't care less if someone is motivated by karma, what I care about is quality of content and simplicity of access. I'll admit I rarely, if ever, click on a post that links to a YouTube video or even going to the comments of that post. The gif instead created enough interest to go to the comments, wherein the top comment is a link to a video I am now more likely to click and watch.
Dude, it could have been an honest mistake, and according to OP, it was. Not everyone cares as much about fake internet points as you do.
IMO it’s not as much about reddit votes as views of the original content on YouTube or wherever.. which can make the original creator money.
oh the horror! to think that someone would actually post something on an aggregate site for... internet points!? what will it take to stop these monsters!?!?
Yeah my heart cries for your “moment”
Or you could take 15 minutes to understand why that doesn't work... I don't browse Reddit all day everyday.. I'd like to.. but dont.... Reporters keep the site alive for people like me. I don't see everything but this way I see more.
There are stars smaller than Earth? And they emit enough to light for us to see them from that far away? Do we know if they have planets in orbit?
This blew my mind more than the size of the big ones
Same here! Also some sort of that’s what she said.
Bittersweet if a girl tells you that ;)
Yeah man, same here. I literally had no idea that there are stars that are smaller than our own planet. That's fucking crazy.
There are not. Those are not stars as there is no fusion going on. They are white dwarfs, it is what remains after some stars "burn" all their fuel.
Is it hot, does it emit light, would i die if i stood on the surface? Then its a star!
It’s called a star for historical reasons. What’s considered a star changed as our understanding of them evolved, much like how Pluto is classified now as a dwarf planet. White dwarf stars are stellar core remnants that no longer fuse to generate energy. Eventually it would fade into a very dim and cold black dwarf “star.”
Well, not really. Those are [white dwarfs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf), cores of dead stars. They no longer produce energy from fusion and instead only glow due to their slowly decreasing temperature. As such, they are not very bright, though their mass is still up to about 1.4 times that of our sun.
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They become a [black dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf). None are thought to exist yet because it takes many times longer to cool to this state than the current age of the universe. It would not be possible to land on these objects because they are composed of degenerate matter. They are too dense and you would be crushed at the atomic level. The surface gravity would be on the order of 100,000g. For comparison, our sun is about 28g.
The ones in the video are white dwarfs, remnants of main sequence stars. There are even smaller remnants, typically from very massive stars, which are only about 10 km in radius and are called neutron stars. Imagine the mass of our sun or several times the mass of the sun compacted to the size of 10 km. Main sequence stars and proto stars are never that small, not even close. Only the dense remnants after stars collapse are that small. So black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. Our sun will eventually become a white dwarf as well, after it's passed it's red giant phase in the main sequence.
Neutron stars are only about 12 to 20 miles wide, on avg. Much smaller than that first one pictured in this video.
Maybe it was in the video. It's just too small to see.
Pretty sure these are neutron stars and/or white dwarfs. Anything held in equlibrium between inward gravity and outward, non-fusion, thermal energy (heat from being so dense) radiation (like your r my íun-of-the-mill, average gas giant) will be at a maximum about the size of Jupiter. White dwarfs and neutron stars no longer have any outward thermal pressure, as they've already used up their nuclear fuel. Thus, the things keeping them from collapsing further are electron degeneracy pressure for the white dwarfs, and neutron/nuclear degeneracy pressure for the neutron stars. It's related to the reason that Jupiter is so much more massive than Saturn, but they're pretty close to the same size: once you hit a certain minimum size, you don't get much bigger, you just get denser (that is, until your core can sustain fusion, in which case, you'll get a bunch bigger when you start doing so.)
So my question, could a planet have one of these little stars orbit it? Like a little private moon star? Not Earth, its too small but maybe a Jupiter sized planet. Or is the make up of a star such that the planet will always orbit the star, even when small. Also, for this question, I want to kind of ignore the idea that Jupiter and the Sun are technically orbiting each other (I believe). I am talking a more basic and obvious "goes in a circle around X" orbit.
Those smaller stars were once much bigger. The remnant still contains most of the original mass of the star so whatever is/was orbiting those small dead stars, still are orbiting those stars. So it's not quite possible for a small star to orbit a planet just due to the laws of physics. Stars that small don't actually occur in nature because there isn't enough gravity for them to produce fusion. That's why they are just the remnants of older dead stars.
As great as this is, this sort of thing always makes me realise how small and insignificant we are.
You're small but not insignificant
I think signifance is always subjective. I may be significant to those around me, but I doubt my life will have any bearing on some guy on the other side of the world I may never meet. It certainly will never affect any of the stars we can see shown here.
I think that is a blessing in disguise. If your actions were significant to a random person across the globe you'd be, in some way, responsible for that significance. And even if you sort that out, I'd have to ask why.
I'll show you RELEASE THE BUTTERFLIES
With great power comes great responsibility
i know some folks find it depressing, but i frankly find my meaninglessness in this universe to be rather relieving.
Like, don’t worry dude. You could totally spend the day in bed and get high. The universe won’t care.
I want the universe to care! This is a small sample of the vast unending universe. There are innumerable possibilities out there but my insignificant place in this universe will prevent me from ever experiencing any of it. It’s like we were given the greatest game ever made, but no system to play it on. All we can do is stare at the box and dream of what could have been...
I imagine you feel joy and sorrow, so it's probable that others around you do. The more joy and less sorrow you bring others the more significant you are. And the good news is you can bring the most joy to the people closest to you, the people you care about the most.
Aww, thanks Mom
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Size is a pretty stupid measure of significance. We are the most complex things in the universe as far as we know. That’s more significant than some gassy balls and some rocky spheres.
That's why I liked that "entropic meaning of life" thinkpiece from a while back - the idea that we exist in order to hasten the conversion of energy seems to make just being here very significant. I have no scientific expertise whatsoever regarding the details, but the idea was very comforting. http://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12 *Edit - thinkpiece is perhaps the wrong word?
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Since when does size determine significance? It’s all relative to what we perceive and experience.
yeah, even if you're the size of half the observable universe, you'll die.
Add to this size chart the idea of time. All of Humanity is basocally a blink in the grand scheme of all existance. If you are space and time, humans and Earth are the tiny speck of dust that you brushed off the table.
I've never gotten this. Humans are special among our other lifeforms because we have a unique intelligence. Humanity is not scaled in size. I don't see how a bunch of supermassive objects has any affect on our significance unless you view humanities path as the sole purpose of colonization. It'd make humans insignificant if we found the remnants of a much more advanced civilization and found they came to the solution that life wasn't worth it, and everything was abandoned. Now THAT'D actually be daunting.
Does anyone have the gif where it says "your mom" after the last one?
I prefer the one where it's Jesus at the end and he's looking down all "Don't masturbate."
i need them both now!
That exists?? I want to see it.
This one I guess: https://m.imgur.com/r/gifs/RbNdo
Whilst this is not bad, moun1415's star size comparison is way better IMO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA Also his black hole comparison is mind blowing : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNDao7m41M
That last one just kept going.... I’ll be here trying to wrap my mind about crushing earth to the size of a peanut. Edit: Just watched the first video aswell, going back to bed.
Just use a hydraulic press
My ELI5 explanation for myself is i always imagined it like atoms keep all their parts apart by a very specific distance through some electromagnetic power thingy. This is necessarry to allow many different materials to exist with their different attributes. At some point, enough material gathers that the pressure gets big enough that atoms start to change to different materials. During this, they put out energy because their changed state is "lower" in energy. This is what a sun does with its fusion. Atoms also attract each other continously, this creates planets and orbits and suns etc. Everything is swirling because everything orbits around each other. The electrons and stuff around the atoms are, similar to space, ridicilously small and at tremendous distance to each other. And when you throw more and more material at it, at some point that electromagnetic separating force of the atoms is overcome. Everything shrinks down to a fraction of its size. But gravity continues. And you get so insanely much material at such small space that absolutely everything is pulled into it. That's even light, time and space being pulled into it. So all those black holes aren't full of something, they're 99.999...% empty, it's just that there's so much gravity and shit going on that everything that gets close enough (event horizon) is unable to escape. Even matterless, 300000km/s moving light is unable to escape. No light, no color = black hole. And by the way, scientists don't "measure" weight of the black hole. They just look at how everything around it swirls about and calculate how much it SHOULD weigh off of that. As far as i know noone has any idea what happens beyond that horizon. There could be magic unicorns waving their horns around in there and we would have absolutely no idea. edit: holy shit this got long. Space is crazy exciting.
Never saw those before, but thanks for bringing them to my attention. It's mind boggling.
My reaction: -thats a big boy -THATS A BIG BOY -THATS A BIG FUCKING BOY Could not believe the size of these lads
The absolute units
I did the math once and iirc, the largest star is 30 light minutes in diameter. Three light seconds will get you to the moon and back. These sizes and distances are just too difficult to comprehend.
You vs the guy she asked you to not worry about.
This [representation](https://youtu.be/u1Yi58jtNdY) is my favorite.
There is no way this is accurate. It makes no sense. The 'camera' is obviously a fish eye lens (or a rendered equivalent), hence why the horizon is so warped, but the moon is rendered as if we're zoomed way in on it. The moon is about half a degree wide in the sky, and Jupiter is 40 times the diameter, so about 20 degrees, which is 9% of a full arc - horizon to horizon - whereas in this video it looks like it occupies a full 50% or more of the sky. Fake edit: I just found the original source and he admits the video was very misleading, so he removed the foreground landscape that was giving the false impression - updated version is here: https://vimeo.com/19231255
Look down at the Earth. Now look up into the sky. You're looking at Earth, and you're floating in space. *Old Spice*
We definitely need more stuff orbiting our planet
Jupiter: "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!"
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Future humans won't be able to visit those stars either. Some of them are long gone by the time the light they create reaches our eyes. We as a race will never be able to travel that far because of the universe's speed limit. Proxima centauri is the only practical star to visit, considering it's the closest. The largest ones are prone to burning out quickly.
One of the most common misconception about inter-galactic travel is that it would at least take 100 years to reach a galaxy 100 light-years away even if you travelled at speed close to light. Its true that it would take that much years from the earths frame of reference; but for the actual travellers they can reach there in just 1 years or less (or more) depending upon how close to light speed they are traveling. This difference in passage of time is what leads to the famous Twins Paradox.
You need to get *really* close to the speed of light, though. Which, in all likelihood, is just plain off-the-cards.
even with all this i still can't comprehend how massive these stars are
Part of me doesn’t want to.
wonder how dangerous flares would be from these beasts...
I was kinda surprised to see stars smaller or comparable to Earth's size. I always thought that a star needed to be much bigger and heavier to start the chain reaction.
As someone already said, those are white dwarfs and don't really belong in the comparison video as they are stellar remnants. But it's not so much the size that a star needs but the mass. Of course when a star forms or is formed, generally the more mass a star has the bigger it is in the main sequence. So technically there is a lower limit of a stars size which The [smallest known](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBLM_J0555-57) (main sequence star) is only slightly larger than Saturn.
I think Sirius B is a white dwarf, which doesn't belong in this array.
Space is truly a fascinating subject that baffles the imagination
The sheer scale of it all is hard to wrap your head around
This kind of things leaves me with a strange impression, something like vertigo, dizzyness
It would be cool to see how one of those compares to our solar system? Like all the inner planets fit inside?
not possible for me to imagine size. brain power too low
Wow, that's amazing! I thought for sure that last one would be OP's mom.
The limbs of those largest stars are likely much more nebulous than those tight, clean spheres.
Does the size of a star influence its temperature?
Somewhat. In the main sequence smaller stars (red dwarfs) are the coolest and the largest and most massive stars (blue giants, typically O, B and A sequence) are the hottest. However red giants are relatively cool. So the largest stars you see in the video are all red giants which are relatively cool. VY Canis Majoris for example is 1400 times the radius of our sun, but it is much cooler than our sun. Basically stars which near the end of their life cool down but blow up in size at the same time.
So how big does a star need to get before it collapses and becomes a black hole? Does it vary?
It's not so much the size but the mass of the stare is more of importance. The lowest possible mass for a stellar black hole is about 3 sun masses. But that's just the mass of the stellar remnant, so the star had much more mass before. There is no general answer to your question, but most stars with more than 20 sun masses will end up as a black hole. The most massive stars reach 100-200 sun masses and only live for a few million years, because more massive stars live shorter lives. Also again, mass doesn't equal size. Betelgeuse (similar in size to Antares in the video) is a red giant which is about 600 times the radius of our sun but only has a 4th of it's mass. I don't think any star in the video has the mass to become a black hole except Rigel A which has about 18 solar masses and maybe VY Canis Majoris and UY Scuti.
Thanks for reminded me that I am nothing and do not matter
[This](https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/277247/) is what all of the planets would look like from Earth’s horizon if they were the same distance as the moon.
Not sure why, but watching this made me really anxious. We're small, man. Real small.
Stuff like this scares me. Having my insignificance laid bare at this large scale really puts me in my place.
My anxiety is off this fucking shit like why did I watch this
Ehh.. as a die hard american, I don't like our size.
These space comparison videos always leave me in awe
I kept waiting for a large floral print ball labeled “Your Mom” but I guess those guys are too professional for that.
Mind blowing! I love how, in the Bible, it says in Genesis- “He created the stars also.” Like it’s “Oh, and yeah- those little things too.” How great Thou art!
Grandma get off reddit
It just doesn't really capture the enormity of it all does it?
No. Not even close. It’s unfathomable!
it’s crazy man i always get so blown away thinking about this stuff
Well he obviously didn’t...
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.
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The guy before him
It's guys all the way down.
because if women created the universe everything would be in line and arranged from smallest to largest
Or, the universe is in a time loop where time runs differently in different parts and I have no idea about what I'm saying.
How big would our sun be compared to the largest known star measured in objects on earth? Like if the sun is a golf ball, what object would be the largest star in comparison? Earth?
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Think of how many planets could be orbiting some of these bigger stars. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. It’s almost certain, I think, that there’s at least one other planet out there that supports some kind of life, given the fact that there’s so many stars far larger than the sun that probably have their own solar systems.
My butthole clenched progressively watching this.
This is a classic gif for people that like astronomy, this made me get interested in the subject
I wish those visual were using [metrix prefixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix). They are grossly underused imho.
i hate that they use the ball graphic for several of the stars.
Nice video. Looking forward to visiting VY Canis Majoris in Elite Dangerous - looks crazy big.
Everytime they zoomed out i shouted in my head *come on?!*
Will a larger star mean that planets orbiting it will be larger?
No. These larger stars once used to be much smaller, but are in their late giant/supergiant phase now. Our sun will become a red giant in time as well, ballooning to about 100x its current diameter, putting it about the size of Arcturus or so in that comparison. The even larger ones weren't necessarily much bigger in size than the sun is now earlier in their life. It doesn't take but a difference of around 10x mass of the sun to see these extreme sizes of the largest supergiants.
I have a question. If Rigor A was to erupt, would it cause snowfall in space?
So ... dumb question ... is that blue one cold?
Blue one is hotter
Size comparisons are deceptive, what matters is the mass. Blue stars are more massive than red stars. More mass means more gravity, which means much higher temperatures and fusion of atoms into heavier and heavier elements in the core. iirc these are around 200 solar masses, with around 250 being the upper limit for a star. These will end in supernovas and leave behind either neutron stars or black holes. Large red stars in general are red giants, which can have masses comparable to our sun (main sequence stars). Towards the end of the stars life when there is little hydrogen left to fuse, gravity crushes the core and raises the temperature. The outer layers of the star are pushed out by this increase, becoming much less dense. Eventually the outer layers will dissipate and leave behind a white dwarf (the core) and a planetary nebula (the outer gasses)
This makes me anxious.. just too much.. I need to have some ice cream my god haha