The Moon Has Mountains Taller Than Everest
Despite the moons relatively small size, it has some truly gigantic features including mountains that are taller than Mount Everest and depressions that are almost as deep as the Mariana Trench. The main reason the moon is so bumpy is because it doesnt have flowing water, which is constantly eroding virtually every surface feature on Earth. This means every crater left by an asteroid or other impact stays in place for an extremely long time and even the footprints left by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 70s are still visible.
Maps Of The Solar System
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Beyond The Solar System
Because we can see so many stars at night, its tempting to imagine that our solar system sits right next to other ones, like houses on a street. But the truth as shown by this GIF made from the 100,000 Stars explorer is that our solar system, like most others, is a lonely one, like a single house in an entire city. You have to zoom way, way out to see just a handful of other stars. By analogy, if you put Earth at home plate and the sun on the pitchers mound, the next-closest star would be about 3,072 miles away.
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Have You Ever Wondered Where Are The Planets Right Now
For people interested in astrology the current positions and movements of the planets are very important and can give you a clue into how you are feeling and how your day is going to pan out. For astronomers, it’s equally important to know where the planets are so that they can observe them. For others, getting an understanding of where the Earth is in relation to the Sun and moon and planets is just, well, sort of nice to know. If you’ve ever sat outside at night and got into an discussion about whether that bright star is actually a planet, and if it is – “Which planet is it?”, then this site might help narrow down the options!
This online orrery will hopefully help you to understand what’s going on out there.
If We Terraformed Mars
People have long dreamed about terraforming Mars that is, altering its atmosphere and climate so humans could live on it. We currently have no real way of doing this, but people have proposed all sorts of ideas mostly involving importing a chemical such as hydrogen or ammonia that would theoretically trigger global warming and the buildup of an atmosphere. These renderings show what the intermediate stages of the project might look like, ultimately culminating in a relatively Earth-like planet that humans could colonize.
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The Solar System Is Mostly Empty Space
…maps of the solar system are almost never to scale. In reality, the solar system is a vast, empty area, populated by a single star and a few tiny, spaced-out planets with huge, huge gaps between them. If you somehow flew by it at the speed of light, you might well miss it entirely, and simply see a bright sun surrounded by nothingness. Josh Worths If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel is the best way to see how empty the solar system really is.
Map Explainer: The Caucasus Region
The Caucasus Region has been engulfed in a territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region for decades now. Although flare-ups in the conflict have been recent, the root of the violence harkens back to the 1980s.
But this map allows us to step back and look at the region in its larger context.
While most media has focused on the tensions, this map breaks down the entire Caucasus region, providing key facts and information. What are the countries that comprise the region? What is the main economic activity in the area? How is the population distributed? Lets begin.
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Animation: New Water Map Of Mars
The hunt for water on has always been a point of interest for researchers.
Earth has life almost everywhere water exists. Water is an ideal target for finding lifeforms, like microbes, that may exist on other planets.
And if Mars is to become a future home, knowing where water exists will be necessary for our survival.
Both NASA and the European Space Agency have special instruments searching for water on the red planet. After 10 years of in-depth investigation, their latest findings suggest a new water map for Mars.
An Orbit Map Of The Solar System
June 10 2019 · Link to the Open-Source Code
This weeks map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of thats over 10km in diameter – about 10000 asteroids – as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years Eve 1999.
All of the data for this map is shared by NASA and open to the public. However, the data is stored in several different databases so I had to do a decent amount of data cleaning. Ive explained all of the steps in detail in my open-source code and tutorial, so Ill just include a sketch of the process here in this blog post:
One of the most challenging parts of this map was figuring out how to make everything legible. It turns out that things in the solar system are distributed somewhat logarithmically. There are exponentially more things closer to the sun, and exponentially more smaller things than big things. So I used a radial logarithmic scale to include large things, far-away things, and tiny, nearby things on the same map. Logarithmic maps arent particularly common, but in this case I figured it was ok since no one would use this map for navigation.
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Pluto Isnt At The Edge Of The Solar System
Many of us imagine cold, little Pluto to be at the outer edge of the solar system. But thats far from the truth. Beyond Pluto lie the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud: distant, poorly understood regions of space that contain millions of comets and icy rocks. The Kuiper belt is a disc of asteroids and other objects a bit farther away than Neptune. But the Oort Cloud which we only know about from the comets that occasionally drift in from it is believed to extend a thousand times as far, about halfway to the next closest star to us.
What Are The Components Of The Solar System
The solar system is something that sparks interest as soon as one mentions it or comes across the same in a publication. The following are the five major components comprising it.
The planetary system is deeply rooted in human civilization since ancient times, and vastly impacts our religious beliefs, mythology, culture and even impacts specific scientific applications like Planetary Astrology.
Image Source:
Jupiter comes fifth in the line of planets in order from the Sun and is the biggest planet in the entire solar system. This planet is named after the Roman God of the same name and is a gas giant composed primarily of Hydrogen.
Image Source: earthhow.com
Venus, thats second in line from the sun, is the hottest planet in Solar System with a consistent temperature of 462 degrees Celsius thats the same in every part of the planet. It is also one of the brightest galactic objects visible from the Earth. Thats why it is named after the Goddess of Beauty in Roman Mythology, inspired by its luster. Venus is a terrestrial planet and is often called the sister planet of Earth due to the similarities of size and mass, and the proximity to the Sun. It is one of the two planets in the solar system that does not have a natural satellite, the other one being Mercury.
Image Source: conceptdraw.com
The order of the planets is classified by the orbital distance that each planet have from the Sun.
Image Source: glogster.com
Image Source: waitbutwhy.com
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National Geographic Remaps Solar System Through A Brand
THE INTERACTIVE IS THE FIRST UPDATED MAP OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM AND SUN IN NEARLY 40 YEARS, ALLOWING NAT GEO TO EXPAND THE VIEW OF SPACE TO ALL
The digital experience is part of a larger package on the solar system being published online at natgeo.com/space and featured in the September issue of the magazine
EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS, MAPS, AND ANIMATED GRAPHICS AVAILABLE
WASHINGTON, DC In a year where National Geographic has reimagined what dinosaurs looked like and identified a fifth ocean, the brand is now turning its attention to space and redefining what we thought we knew about asteroids, dwarf planets and more, making it accessible to everyone in the process.
Ahead of Space Week in October and the launch of NASAs Lucy Mission later this year , the remaps the solar system as we know it today. Its estimated that about 90% of the million or so known solar system objects have been found since 2000! In the next decade or so, scientists could find at least another 5 million more. Ever since the 2006 reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet, scientists have uncovered a far larger and livelier solar system than most people learned about in school. In the cover feature, The small wonders unlocking secrets of the solar system, by author Michael Greshko, the flood of new research on our solar systems small bodies and the remarkable efforts to find and visit them are surveyed, an effort that is fundamentally remapping our cosmic home.
*IMAGES/ASSET FOR THE INTERACTIVE ARE HERE*
The Four Phases Of Nasas Human Spaceflight History
Since its 1958 establishment, NASA has gone through four main phases in human spaceflight. First, there was Mercury: a mission to launch a human into Earths orbit and return him safely as soon as possible, with hopes of beating the USSR to the milestone. Then there was Gemini: a series of launches that put a pair of astronauts into orbit for several days at a time, in preparation for a lunar mission. It was followed by Apollo, which successfully put astronauts on the moon and effectively ended the space race. Finally, after a brief drought in human spaceflight came the Space Shuttle: a series of reusable spaceplanes that carried out 135 launches before being retired in 2011.
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Asteroids Have Hit Earths Atmosphere
Every so often, a small piece of space comes down from the sky and hits us. This map shows 556 small asteroids that have burned up in Earths atmosphere over the course of about two decades. Most of them disintegrated harmlessly, but one exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, breaking thousands of windows and causing injuries. The odds of a more destructive asteroid hitting us are low, but it does happen from time to time and many experts say were not doing enough to track and prevent such incidents.
Jupiters Moon Europa Could Have More Water Than Earth
Of all the objects in the solar system, scientists might be most excited about Jupiters moon Europa. Thats because it likely has a liquid water ocean underneath a layer of surface ice and that ocean may have more water than all of Earth, as shown in this image. If theres water, there may be life. NASA is in the early stages of planning an uncrewed mission to Europa in the 2020s.
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Sun’s Location And Neighborhood
Location of EarthOrion ArmRadcliffe WaveSplitSplitLocal Bubble
The Sun is near the inner rim of the Orion Arm, within the Local Fluff of the Local Bubble, between the Radcliffe Wave and Split linear structures . Based upon studies of stellar orbits around Sgr A* by Gillessen et al. , the Sun lies at an estimated distance of 27.14 ± 0.46 kly from the Galactic Center. Boehle et al. found a smaller value of 25.64 ± 0.46 kly , also using a star orbit analysis. The Sun is currently 530 parsecs above, or north of, the central plane of the Galactic disk. The distance between the local arm and the next arm out, the Perseus Arm, is about 2,000 parsecs . The Sun, and thus the Solar System, is located in the Milky Way’s galactic habitable zone.
There are about 208 stars brighter than absolute magnitude 8.5 within a sphere with a radius of 15 parsecs from the Sun, giving a density of one star per 69 cubic parsecs, or one star per 2,360 cubic light-years . On the other hand, there are 64 known stars within 5 parsecs of the Sun, giving a density of about one star per 8.2 cubic parsecs, or one per 284 cubic light-years . This illustrates the fact that there are far more faint stars than bright stars: in the entire sky, there are about 500 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 4 but 15.5 million stars brighter than apparent magnitude 14.
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Galactic
The Sun Is Absolutely Ginormous
It might not be a big surprise to you that the sun is really, really big. But this image, part of a great series on the size of astronomical objects by John Brady, underscores that its vast on a scale thats simply difficult for our puny human minds to understand. We think of the Earth as a big place: flying around the equator on a 747 at top speed would take about 42 hours. Flying around the sun at the same speed, by contrast, would take about six months.
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Solar System Map Of Current Planetary Positions
Both apps show a solar system map – a “plan view” of the planets laid out in the plane of the ecliptic .
Dwarf planet positions are also shown – but it should be realised that these objects often rise far above and below the plane of the ecliptic. This is because their orbital planes are tilted with respect to the ecliptic – by more than 40 degrees in some cases. So be aware that just because the app may occasionally show a planet and a dwarf planet to be very close to each other in the plan view, they may, in fact, be separated by a large perpendicular distance.
Weve Found Hundreds Of Distant Planets
Each bright dot in this GIF is a planet orbiting a distant star. Weve found more than 1,800 exoplanets over the past few decades, just by surveying our neighborhood of the Milky Way . The bright cone of light is made up of planets found by the Kepler Space Telescope, which has only surveyed a small section of the sky. Scientists now believe that every star, on average, is orbited by a planet so there are certainly thousands more planets to be found, some of which might be home to extraterrestrial life.
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A To Scale Map Of The Solar System
or… why don’t you ever see both the size of the planets and the distances between them to true scale?
As Douglas Adams famously wrote “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” He was talking about the size of the Universe, but this phrase still applies if you are only trying to think about the size of the solar system – which of course is insignificant in terms of the scale of the universe.
The problem of showing all the planets and their orbits to scale is limited by our computer screens – or rather the number of pixels.
To prove the point Josh Worth has plotted out the solar system to scale as if the Moon were only 1 pixel. The result… clever, interesting and ultimately tedious! And it shows why you’ll virtually never see a to scale model of the Solar System without putting various sized fruits around a football field…
Or even driving along a straight 985 metre road in Alice Springs with a basketball of 23.2cm diameter at one end and a grain of sand of 0.38mm diameter at the other end….
As a rough guide, the diameter of the planets on this 1:6,000,000,000 scale would be Mercury 0.8mm, Earth and Venus 2mm, Mars 1.1mm, Jupiter 2.4cm, Saturn 2cm, Uranus 8.5mm, Neptune 8.3mm.
To see a version of this video but with more explanation click here.
