The univers, planets and stuff

You guys are hurting my head! See what you started MG? You've gone all quiet now. Smile

You know when "they" say "Hey everyone, we've found life on other planets." and what they really mean is that they've found a tiny bit of fluff or "matter" or something that could have been green millions of years ago? How boring is that? I want aliens with big purple eyes and 3 long fingers on each of their five arms!

x

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Dorothy Parker wrote:

I want aliens with big purple eyes and 3 long fingers on each of their five arms!

I'm not sure where the odd numbered arm might be located...nature tends to provide appendages in pairs...bilateral symmetry if you want to get technical about it, but honestly only those really nerdy types know that kind of ****....anyway....hey, it's your imagination....and it is quite possible that your desired alien is indeed out there somewhere in the ever expanding abyss.

Disclaimer: My use of the term "ever expanding" should not be taken to heart, I used it simply because I like the way it sounds, especially when said using a Carl Sagan or William F. Buckley type of voice....or even that one guys voice...the guy that did the voice on the phone for the "Scream" movies, he does a lot of the movie trailers as well...and he's in one of those new car insurance commercials where the people tell the story, and a famous person relays it to us in their own distinct style....Little Richard did one, he was screaming about hot gravy or something...WoOooOoooo....oh, my point was....

...some believe that the universe will only expand to a certain extent. The initial outward force of the big bang will at some point be overcome by the gravitational pull of the collective mass of the universe...all will invert upon itself, we will return to singularity once again, and the process will begin anew. But I don't know much about all that...I'm gonna go see if I can find that Little Richard commercial...that thing is a real hoot.

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In case anyone really cares....the "Scream" phone voice was done by a guy named Roger Jackson. The movie trailer/Geico commercial guy is named Don LaFontaine.

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2PacksAday wrote:

In case anyone really cares....the "Scream" phone voice was done by a guy named Roger Jackson. The movie trailer/Geico commercial guy is named Don LaFontaine.

Have you ever heard the radio commercial for the James Brown Home Alarm System?

A Classic.

HEY!

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stuh505 wrote:

And if you want to get a more hands on feel for scale in the universe, check out this 3d simulator I wrote.

It only works on windows XP.

This simulator is simply modelling the gravitational attraction using Newton's laws. It does not incorporate general relativity (no gravity waves). (no such simulator for that exists anyway). For fun try turning gravity off see how the orbits change then turn it back on. You can also compare the traces of the orbits of the planets to the actual measured orbits from real life.

Be sure the read the little readme for keyboard controls. When you start the program time will be stopped, you will be zoomed out to a size large enough to see the 9 planets, and everything will be to scale. As such, the planets are all too small to see which is why you just see their names. However, the sun is visible at this size and is represented by a yellowish circle. All the other planets have full texture and 3d shape and also spin at the proper rate (althogh it might not look proper because I did not use any motion blur), but you will need to change the planet scale in order to see them.

http://www.cems.uvm.edu/~sheinric/starfield/

Why are all of the planets expect Pluto essentially in the same plane?

I like it, it's really visual.

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Re: The univers, planets and stuff

material girl wrote:

Yet again I got myself into a tizzy thinking about the eartha dn the universe surrounding it.How space just goes on and on and on and on......
then I started thinking that how out of all the planets are we the only ones to have a breathable atmosphere with things like people,animals(not single celled omebas) living on it.

Are we at the centre of something?
Why us?
What when how where when who..??!!

We may be the only planet that has a breathable atmosphere, and perhaps animals and people, in our solar system, but there are trillions of other solar systems. There is no reason whatever to believe that we are unique in any way, and we are certainly not at any type of center.

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Saying that we are the only planet with a breathable atmosphere rather begs the description. The original atmosphere did not contain oxygen, and the original inhabitants of this planet would have been poisoned by an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Because so much oxygen has been added to the atmosphere, oxygen-loving organizims have been able to thrive, to prosper and to populate the surface of the planet. The way you have described it, Brandon, it makes it sound as though life can only arise in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which we don't know to be a fact.

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This is a cool topic. I don't have anything particularly smart or insightful to add. I'm just going to sit in the background and read along.

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Setanta wrote:

Saying that we are the only planet with a breathable atmosphere rather begs the description. The original atmosphere did not contain oxygen, and the original inhabitants of this planet would have been poisoned by an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Because so much oxygen has been added to the atmosphere, oxygen-loving organizims have been able to thrive, to prosper and to populate the surface of the planet. The way you have described it, Brandon, it makes it sound as though life can only arise in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which we don't know to be a fact.

I certainly did not mean to imply that life requires oxygen. I doubt that it does.

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Quote:

Why are all of the planets expect Pluto essentially in the same plane?

Because of the way that the solar system formed. We start with a large low density nebular cloud which we will say is "roughly" a spherical blob. Gravity between the particles in the nebula causes it to contract. As it contracts, conservation of angular momentum causes any amount of angular momentum to be magnified greatly. Thus the blob starts to spin as it contracts. By spinning this creates centripetal force which is stronger in the the plane of spinning. The centripetal force opposes gravity in that one dimension. The result is that as the nebula contracts, it is speeding up, and also flattening into a disk. This is why all the planets are roughly coplanar. We call this plane the ecliptic plane. Being farther away from the center of mass of the solar system than the other planets, the flattening effect would have been less strong for Pluto, but nobody really knows exactly why it has 17% orbit tilt as opposed to the only a few percent for most of t he other planets.

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Pluto in all likelyhood originates from the Kuiper Belt. Some of the objects within that belt also have orbital tilts.

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

It's pretty likely that Pluto will be demoted from planet status.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=pluto

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2packs wrote

Quote:

In case anyone really cares....the "Scream" phone voice was done by a guy named Roger Jackson. The movie trailer/Geico commercial guy is named Don LaFontaine.

Of course I care! Useless bits of film trivia like that make my day.

x

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InfraBlue wrote:

Pluto in all likelyhood originates from the Kuiper Belt.

So you think it was a KBO that lost orbital energy, or you are saying it was just put there by slingshot like the other KBOs?

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stuh505 wrote:

InfraBlue wrote:
Pluto in all likelyhood originates from the Kuiper Belt.

So you think it was a KBO that lost orbital energy, or you are saying it was just put there by slingshot like the other KBOs?

I have no idea how those objects got there. In Wikipedia's Kuiper belt page a pic of another KBO is shown, 1998 WW31, with an orbit with a greater degree of tilt than Pluto.

This is what Wikipedia says in its KB page:

Modern computer simulations show the Kuiper belt to have been strongly influenced by Jupiter and Neptune. During the early period of the Solar System, Neptune's orbit is thought to have migrated outwards from the Sun due to interactions with minor bodies. In the process, Neptune swept up, or gravitationally ejected all the bodies closer to the Sun than about 40 AU (the inner edge of the region occupied by cubewanos), apart from those which fortuitously were in a 2:3 orbital resonance. These resonant bodies formed the plutinos. The present Kuiper Belt members are thought to have largely formed in their present position, although a significant fraction may have originated in the vicinity of Jupiter, and been ejected by it to the far regions of the Solar system.

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Pluto is no longer a planet. It's now a "dwarf planet."

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InfraBlue wrote:

stuh505 wrote:
InfraBlue wrote:

Modern computer simulations show the Kuiper belt to have been strongly influenced by Jupiter and Neptune. During the early period of the Solar System, Neptune's orbit is thought to have migrated outwards from the Sun due to interactions with minor bodies. In the process, Neptune swept up, or gravitationally ejected all the bodies closer to the Sun than about 40 AU (the inner edge of the region occupied by cubewanos), apart from those which fortuitously were in a 2:3 orbital resonance. These resonant bodies formed the plutinos. The present Kuiper Belt members are thought to have largely formed in their present position, although a significant fraction may have originated in the vicinity of Jupiter, and been ejected by it to the far regions of the Solar system.

Ok that all makes sense. Wish I could watch some of those simulations though!

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stuh505,

Nice links!

You say that there are a finite number of planets in the universe. This is saying that the universe is finitely large.

If it's infinite, why do people talk about it expanding?

If it's finite, what happens when you reach the edge (do you warp to the opposite point on the sphere)?

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aperson wrote:

You say that there are a finite number of planets in the universe. This is saying that the universe is finitely large.

Yeah.

Quote:

If it's infinite, why do people talk about it expanding?

The expansion only makes sense in the case of a finite universe. The expansion of the universe is not explainable by common forces like an explosion. It's very different. Supposedly all matter started out in a singularity which has expanded to it's present size at an accelerating rate.

Quote:

If it's finite, what happens when you reach the edge (do you warp to the opposite point on the sphere)?

No because if the outer fringes of matter are expanding and not teleporting around willy nilly, then a human that got there would also not teleport...the expansion would apply to them the same way it does to everything else, moving them away at an accelerating rate.

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stuh505 wrote:

aperson wrote:
You say that there are a finite number of planets in the universe. This is saying that the universe is finitely large.

Yeah.

Quote:
If it's infinite, why do people talk about it expanding?

The expansion only makes sense in the case of a finite universe. The expansion of the universe is not explainable by common forces like an explosion. It's very different. Supposedly all matter started out in a singularity which has expanded to it's present size at an accelerating rate.

Quote:
If it's finite, what happens when you reach the edge (do you warp to the opposite point on the sphere)?

No because if the outer fringes of matter are expanding and not teleporting around willy nilly, then a human that got there would also not teleport...the expansion would apply to them the same way it does to everything else, moving them away at an accelerating rate.

How fast is it expanding?

What would happen if you moved faster than it is expanding?

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stuh505 wrote:

aperson wrote:
You say that there are a finite number of planets in the universe. This is saying that the universe is finitely large.

Yeah.

Quote:
If it's infinite, why do people talk about it expanding?

The expansion only makes sense in the case of a finite universe. The expansion of the universe is not explainable by common forces like an explosion. It's very different. Supposedly all matter started out in a singularity which has expanded to it's present size at an accelerating rate.

Quote:
If it's finite, what happens when you reach the edge (do you warp to the opposite point on the sphere)?

No because if the outer fringes of matter are expanding and not teleporting around willy nilly, then a human that got there would also not teleport...the expansion would apply to them the same way it does to everything else, moving them away at an accelerating rate.

How fast is it expanding?

What would happen if you moved faster than it is expanding?

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