Science Journalists; Neil Degrasse Tyson claims dead pixels may actually be Mercury sized planets!
Ironically mercury while being the closest planet to the sun, isn’t the hottest planet in the solar system. Venus takes that title because of its atmosphere holding so much co2. Im sure its fine were putting so much of it in our atmosphere.
Yeah I prefer summer to winter so if we get summer and super summer now I would enjoy that until I’m dead and after that, why should I care?
/s just in case.
Finally my investment on Arctic Beachside property will pay off.
The beach is great. The only issue is that on days worth going, lots of other folks will be there.
We heat up the planet by 4 or 5 degrees, it’s gonna get much less crowded. It’ll be like a perfect, permanent vacation.
And this is why I worship the Sun
But pray to Joe Pesci, right? You pray to Joe Pesci, right?! RIGHT?
I guess because of perspective, Mercury being millions of miles closer to the camera than it is to the sun, the actual proportions would have the planet being much smaller by comparison
Mercury’s apparent size in the sky when close to us is about twice the size as when mercury is in the other side of the sun from us. So mercury would appear about 75% the size it is in this photo of it were next to the sun (so about the same distance away as the sun is).
Neat! Thanks!
I’m sorry but my socks are still on. 100% wool.
Who picks wool for their fucking socks?
There’s nothing sexy about wool.
I think they can be sexy. Also the point of socks isn’t only to be sexy.
Wool socks are the best and I won’t be entertaining assertions to the contrary. Wool is temperature regulating, not just super thick and hot, so there are wool socks you can wear in the summer. They also don’t hold odor (bacteria) as much.
You are spot on. Add to that, merino wool with an antibacterial coating for sports use eg skiing. Wool socks are the only kind I don’t wear holes through in a matter of months.
Wool is also more durable than cotton, so buying wool, or wool blend socks makes logical sense for something that takes a lot of wear and tear, ie covering your feet.
And they stay insulating even if soaked all the way through. Perfect for hiking or trudging through snow
Well, my socks are off.
…so are my pants
and underwear
and shirt
Mercury is like 30-50 sun’s diameters away from the sun. This perspective makes it look like it’s almost touching.
Size scale matches though
Almost 30 million miles closer to us than the sun is.
Yeah this perspective is weird. It makes it look like the sun takes up 90% of the sky on mercury. That can’t be right though.
How is the next transit of Venus not until 2117? That blows my socks’ mind. Seems like that should be happening very regularly.
It’s probably more about how often it’s visible in your part of the world than it happening at all if I had to guess.
Same reasons for any eclipses :
.1- plane of orbits (the one for Venus and the one for the Earth) do not exactly coincide and
.2- because distances between objects are much larger than objects, including size of the sun.I believe you. Still seems wild that I will never see another one in my lifetime.
My socks were appropriately blown off but I still didn’t get invited.
No, you morons! That’s your thumb with the close ad X under it.
so is basically the whole sky sun on mercury during the day?
Naw, it only looks about three times as big from Mercury. Bake you to death right quick though
Praise the Sun! \0/
Trying to wrap my head around how incromprehensively large even just our sun is always makes me feel dizzy.
We are not even a pale blue dot to most of the universe, and when we disappear nothing will know or remember us.
My fav sun fact is that it burns 400 million tons of hydrogen each second, and will be doing that for billions of years. That’s 400 million tons of the lightest possible element there is. Just absolutely insane how gigantic the mass of the sun is.
My fav is just that the sun is, all by itself, 99% of the total mass of our solar system. Most of the rest of that 1% is Jupiter.
You’re understating it a bit there - the sun is 99.86% of the mass of the solar system by itself. To the nearest whole percent, the solar system consists of 100% “the sun”. To the nearest 0.1%, it’s 99.9% the sun and 0.1% Jupiter.
Looks like a dead pixel.
The scale of the universe continues to blow my mind.
Prepare that mind for further blowage
This series is great. Thanks so much! I am getting sucked into a black hole of these videos.
Always happy to introduce a new person to Kurzgesagt
This reminds me of that part of that space opera I read where there was a nomadic colony on mercury which needed to always be moving at exactly the right speed to stay on the dark side of the terminator.
Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.
I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.
The 3:2 resonance Klear references is considered a type of tidal locking.
Same here. I was so going to ackchyually that guy, but I did a quick check before and turns out there is a day/night cycle.
Apparently one Mercury day takes exactly two Mercury years due to some fuckery involving “3:2 spin-orbit resonance” which is something I’m too drunk to comprehend right now.
Gonna be an interesting wikipedia binge at work tomorrow tho
That was in the Red / Green / Blue mars trilogy, one of my favorites. Though I think I’ve seen the concept in other works as well.
Basically the temp difference between day / night caused contraction of the rail tracks, pushing the whole city forward so it was always just ahead of dawn.
The nomadic colony got expanded on in KSR’s novel 2312. I don’t actually remember much about it in the Mars Trilogy.
But I’ve seen the concept before in an old EU Star Wars novel, one of the Solo books maybe, where Lando was operating something similar as his new venture.
And before that maybe mentioned by Sagan. And before that…
I’ll have to get 2312, haven’t heard of that one. Same universe?
Adjacent, probably. Very similar, and seems to purposefully be set a hundred years after Blue Mars ends (2212).
But it starts and ends on Mercury after a voyage through the solar system, not spending much story time on Mars.
My favorite fun astronomy fact is that a transit like this (Venus, but still) is how we managed to figure out our distance to the Sun in the 1700s
