The visual size of our worlds and galaxy

Wow, Betelgeuse and Antares pick their teeth with our solar system.

Great graphic!

That is a great set of images, Aunt Bee, thanks for that.

Antares is supposedly the guiding star of my astrological sign. It is, however, 600 light years away. The speed of light is 186,282+ miles per second, or just less than 300,000 kilometers per second. To put that into distance, that is 5,676,480,000,000,000 kilometers away; that's 3,587,800,000,000,000 statute miles (Imperial--i didn't convert the speed of light into U.S. Standard). Something which is more than 3 quintillion miles away is not something you will ever convince me is able to affect me personally, which is what the astrologers would have you believe.

Antares has a low heat (relatively speaking, it is much cooler, for example, than the sun), but it is more than 10,000 times brighter than the sun. It is low density, as well, which accounts for its giant size--three astronomical units, roughly. An astronomical unit refers to the distance from the sun to the earth, which averages about 93,000,000 miles. (The astronomical unit has been redefined the Astronomical Union, but it was originally based upon the average orbital distance of the earth). That means that if our sun were the size of Antares, it would engulf all of the inner planets, and reach past Mars, about three quarters of the distance from the Sun to Jupiter. It's luminosity in the infrared is even greater--it is about 65,000 times as bright as the sun in the infrared.

The old astrology BS didn't cut it with me when i began to study Antares, but it did lead me to learn more about the star (and i went a-googling to check my facts before posting here). Antares means, roughly, "not Mars." It is one of the four brightest of the first magnitude stars which are visible in the plane of the ecliptic--which means that it is visible to the naked eye from any part of the surface of the earth at night when the sky is clear. It was named "not Mars" by the Greeks because it is so bright, so obviously red, and the unsophisticated might confuse it with "the red planet" when looking into the night sky.

Thanks, Aunt Bee, for a trip down memory lane.

And who would wish to be thought unsophisticated? Which is what you must be to have any reservations about Setanta's description of a small corner of the Universe.

Obviously.

Setanta
Setanta, my daughter, who is recovering from her major surgery, e-mailed me the site. I'm glad she is able to return to her computer after a long absence.

BBB

The Galaxy Song

(from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, 1983)

Composers: Eric Idle & John Du Prez
Author: Eric Idle

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

wow!

really cool BBB.

Yeah- great. We need some humility.

You can't prove that stuff ! This is all just Evolutionist nonsense. Any id-iot can see that the stars are smaller than the sun.

Eorl


Actually, our star is a minor star, much small than the average star (Sorry Yogi Bear for stealing your line).

BBB

Sorry Beebs, I forgot to post a sarcasm alert.

photo of Earth from Saturn
A photo of Earth from Saturn:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08324