Space, the ultimate "No way!"
Alex Hsu set this month's IndieWeb blog carnival prompt, No Way!? I've not really done a single moment but the ultimate "No way!" for me is space. Every fact I learn about space I'm just like, "Get out of here." So here's some.
Space, as in the Kármán line, is only a hundred kilometres, or sixty-two miles away. Get a motorway built and we could be there in an hour.
The sun is four hundred times larger than the moon and four hundred times further away. This makes them look the same size in our sky. Is this just a massive coincidence? Probably!
But the moon is drifting away at the rate of a couple of centimetres a year. So at some point it will appear too small to block the sun for total eclipses.
Most stars of the same type as our sun are binary or more stars. That would have been pretty cool.
At the observatory someone asked if planets can get ejected from their solar system - they can. And some form outside. There are billions of planets just floating around without a star. What are they doing.
According to the Drake Equation there could well be thousands of other civilisations in our galaxy. But we'll probably never meet because of the vast distances and time involved.
There's a supermassive black hole at the centre of most galaxies, including ours. Our whole universe may be inside a black hole in another universe.
The observable universe is about two hundred billion trillion stars. It's ninety-three billion light-years across. I have a children's book about this. So they can share in the existential crisis.
Dark matter and dark energy. Their whole entire own "no way."
★ Part of It's the stars ★
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