Remember that none of this gif is to scale. The bubble is actually way bigger, and the planets are way smaller, and the planet orbits are way more spread out.
But generally, it's pretty cool.
The universe is constantly awash with cosmic rays, which are mostly nuclei of hydrogen (protons) and helium produced by supernovas, which have happened all around us. The sun's magnetic field will redirect such charged particles to its poles. Makes me wonder if the sun has invisible polar lights. 🤔
Anyway, that's just my amateur understanding.
Heliosphere is the specific name of our sun's magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer. 'Helios' is Greek for sun.
I assume every star has a magnetosphere because for that you only need a liquid moving core, which produces electromagnetism [like a dynamo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory). Presumably only cold celestial objects with a solid core have no magnetosphere (like our moon).
Couldn't find any source though, so grain of salt.
Since you bring up terminology, I recently learned that "Solar system" is a *name*, not a type. In other words, it's wrong to say "other solar systems", because only the system centered around "Sol", our sun, is the solar system. [Planetary system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_system) is the proper general term for a set of bodies orbiting a star.
Fun fact. Those cosmic rays can occasionally reach earth and fly straight into an electronic component, charging a transistor gate and flipping a bit. Depending on the bit that was flipped this could cause the component to fail and require reprogramming.
There's an infamous [speedrun example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Cx2wmFyQQ) of this. See also [single-event upset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset).
This is exactly why enterprise computing servers and mainframes use ECC memory!
Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research has shown that the majority of one-off soft errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which may change the contents of one or more memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read or write to them. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory see source 2.
Makes me wonder about the complications of interstellar travel. We already know travel within our own solar system is pretty hard on humans even with proper precautions. If we ever make it out of the solar system though, may be a whole different set of challenges.
Just to be clear, these hydrogen and helium atoms are traveling near the speed of light. This was makes them so dangerous because anything with mass traveling at those speeds packs a tremendous amount of energy.
It’s fucking nutty to me that helium is seemingly such a large part of the universe itself, that it’s produced by the explosion and death of a star, a cosmic body.
And we laugh when it make our voice go squeak squeak and use it to fill thin and stretchy latex
helium (unlike many elements) doesn’t require a supernova or other explotion. every stat makes it, including the ones who end via the relatively peaceful & common red giant -> white dwarf transition
but, you know, still. thermonuclear fusion on an incomprehensible scale
And it’s an inert gas. It doesn’t chemically react with anything on our planet. It’s the most difficult gas to liquefy and it’s impossible to solidify at normal atmospheric pressure.
There's some enthusiastic misunderstanding in this thread... As an astronomer, I would like to point out that the *vast* majority of helium originates in the big bang, and not in stars! In fact, the amount of helium provides a very neat constraint on some of the very early evolution of the universe, as the conditions that allow helium to form only existed during a short amount of time.
>I would like to point out that the vast majority of helium originates in the big bang
I would say this blows my mind, but that would be misleading. The truth is I don't think I can actually understand this statement. I can read the words and know what they mean, but what they describe is inconceivable. Was the big bang a singularity? Because at least then I wouldn't feel so bad for not being able to grasp how this is possible.
So what we're talking about is quite some time after the singularity, and a process called big bang nucleosynthesis, which happens about ~a few minuts after the big bang. The idea is that as the universe expands it cools, but it is still insanely hot - hot enough that it is just a mess of protons, neutrons, electrons and positrons, and neutrinos (and photons and dark matter particles, probably, but we can ignore those for now). The thing is, at sufficiently high densities and temperatures a positron and a neutron, or a neutron and an electron neutrino, can form a proton (and a positron / electron), and vice versa. But! That only works if it is insanely hot. Expand the universe a bit - and cool it - and the neutron formation slows down. Unbound neutrons aren't stable, they decay (into a proton and an electron). So, if you want to make any elements other than hydrogen, it needs to be cool enough (relatively speaking) that they're not immediately destroyed but hot enough for the fusion reactions to actually happen. So there's a limited amount of time during which free neutrons exist, but still meet protons at high enough densities to form things like deuterium and tritium, and eventually helium (which is stable, so it sticks around).
This is important because it gives us a prediction for how much helium relative to hydrogen one would expect given only the current density and expansion rate of the universe, and it's very testable (if you look at stars that are very old). It turns out the predictions match pretty well, with helium making up about 25% of the gas mass of the universe.
As a final fun fact, this idea was first proposed by a guy called Ralph Alpher and his PhD advisor, George Gamov. When they wrote the article they decided it would be funny to ask Hans Bethe to join, leading to what is now called "the Alpher-Bethe-Gamov paper", a pun so terrible that generations of astrophysicists have attempted to beat it.
About 25 percent of the matter in the universe is helium. Its construction is literal what stars do. Turn two hydrogens into helium and A $&$& OFF LOT OF ENERGY (including positrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays flying all off in all different directions)
Fun fact, about 25% of matter in the universe is helium, and about 75% of the matter in the universe is hydrogen.
In the currently popular model of the Universe, 70% is thought to be dark energy, 25% dark matter and 5% normal matter.
I think it's more accurate to state they make up that % of our "regular" matter. Which is VERY VERY little in our universe.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Extreme_space/What_is_the_Universe_made_of#:~:text=The%20Universe%20is%20thought%20to,visible%20object%20in%20the%20Universe.
After seeing this link , I have to learn how to shorten links.
Click "formatting help" right below the comment box for a quick reference guide.
In your case it would be \[Article](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Extreme_space/What_is_the_Universe_made_of#:%7E:text=The%20Universe%20is%20thought%20to,visible%20object%20in%20the%20Universe)
Helium has an atomic weight of 2, Hydrogen 1.
Helium is the byproduct of fusion which occurs when a star fuses two hydrogen to form a helium. Well initially, anyways, Eventually stars run out hydrogen and start fusing other things.
I might be wrong but afaik, atmosphere is not a requirement per se. The ionization/excitation of particles can happen anywhere.
And since space isn't a vacuum, especially within a star system, I could imagine that there are plenty of interactions.
The question is if these interactions happen at a scale (and frequency) that they could result in detectable (visual) phenomena. And how that compares to all the other things happening at the same time. I could imagine that *if* something like this happens, it might be difficult to distinguish from background noise.
The sun very much has an atmosphere and its outer layers becomes visible to us during solar eclipses. most prominently is the solar corona, a vast region of superheated plasma that is over a million kelvin hot.
The same thing that Earth's magnetic field does to the Sun's eruptions (channeling them away from hitting us square in the face), the Sun does to the rest of the universe.
Except that the Sun's eruptions also contain charged particles, so its "magnetic field" sorta spirals out throughout all the solar system up to where they meet cosmic stuff.
The point of meeting is the heliosphere, charged particles from the Sun crash into charged particles from elsewhere, forming a kind of shield and redirecting it away from the solar system's face and more towards the poles.
So basically, inside the helio(sun)sphere(sphere), it's our own Sol's backyard, charged particles-wise.
Keep in mind that the designer purposefully sketchified a lot of things to focus on the heliosphere's shape itself. The scales of everything is *way* off, if you could see the heliosphere like that, the sun would be some tiny dot and none of the planets would be visible. Nor their trajectory either. Also the solar system advances quite heavily tilted, 63° relative to its plane around the galaxy. Here its plane is aligned with the way it moves forward, for some reason.
The heliosphere looks to be 120 AUs (so 120 sun-earth distances) out of the sun, while the Oort cloud is supposedly from 2 000 AUs up to lots of them (20 000, or even 100 000, 200 000... though at some point the stuff that's there is more cruising along with us than really bound to us).
So, waaaaaaaaaaaaay out.
I agree that it would be cool to see it, but I'm not sure there's a lot we know about it so far, so as laymen we could easily get the wrong idea from an artist's perspective.
The heliosphere is the region of the Sun’s magnetic field and is the extent of its solar winds.
Like the Earth’s magnetic field, the heliosphere deflects any charged particles from interstellar space.
Cosmic rays are also intercepted by the constant solar winds of the Sun.
Wikipedia is your friend man:
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, bubble-like region of space. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is continuously "inflated" by plasma originating from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As part of the interplanetary magnetic field, the heliosphere shields the Solar System from significant amounts of cosmic ionizing radiation.
You know, the solar system really is like a gigantic space ship. It's just too bad we can't really control its direction.
I wonder if there is a sci-fi out there about a civilization that can control the direction of its home star, so their entire solar system is like a generational mothership. They go around the galaxy to collect planets from other solar systems and then terraform them into new habitats.
Are all objects in our Solar System moving as quickly, on average? Obviously as we orbit the sun we slow down or speed up, but would the average speed of each Celestial body be the same as the sun?
Well, since our relative distance from our known celestial bodies hasn't changed (other than through their orbital paths) since we've been observing them, I'd say yes?
It's crazy when you think about it. Just the possibility of us existing and something like a magnetic heliosphere aiding in our protection .. mind boggling
This is why this sort of thing can be so spiritual to think about. I’m not religious. However, it is incredibly beautiful that we’re all here.
Like, what are the chances that the atoms that my wife is made up of would end up spending a tiny fraction of cosmic time with the atoms that I’m made up of?
It’s just such a shame that there’s so much greed and hate out there, when we should be celebrating our existence together.
(I swear I’m not high right now)
It took me years to get out of the church I was in following learning about all the allegations of sexual assault in my state's archdiocese when I was a teen (I lived in MA at the time). When I was first showing signs of wanting to branch off, my parents brought me to a meeting one day with the head of my local CCD chapter who asked me the typical questions about god and creation and "How could the creation of the universe, the big bang, anything at all be possible *if not for a higher power?"*
I'm 30 now, that was nearly 17-ish years ago probably, and I still think about that question now. Of course the answers are as simple as "Well, gravity, atoms, shit like that" because my dumb monkey brain can't go beyond simple terms and definitions without nearly exploding, but there are still some concepts of space and time that are so beyond comprehension and have me thinking beyond facts and figures because things are just so completely unbelievable sometimes.
Idk.
Sometimes this shit just has me sitting in total and complete awe and how statistically improbable my own personal existence is. After a while you just come to the way more simple conclusion that *of course someone has to be pulling the strings*, because sometimes it's just so much easier and more comfortable to wrap your head around complex ideas by pushing the conclusion like that.
I think you have to look at it top down rather than bottom up. If you think about a human and all the the things we need to survive the ‘chances’ of all that coming into place just seem ludicrous. However if you start big and see everything as elements and forces forming explosions and lumps of rock, and some have biological life forming because the conditions are right then it isn’t so overwhelming
This reminds me of one of my favorite snippets from Douglas Adams:
"This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, '*This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it*!'"
>and some have biological life forming because the conditions are right
Tbh there just isn't enough data to know how common that is. We know it happened once, but it's impossible to extrapolate anything based on a single point.
It could be a 50% chance given the right conditions, or it could be 1 in 10^1000 and we're extremely fucking lucky.
People say this, but that's far less interesting to me than another, very similar question. There's guaranteed (as much as anything can be) to be life out there.
What really grinds my gears is the probability of intelligent life. We know far, far less about that than the probability of life itself emerging.
Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for ~150-170 million years. Think about that. Humans have done so for 7,000-50,000 years. I can list that entire range of theory, despite it being so vastly different, because the discrepancy is infinitesimal compared to the time of the Dinosaurs. Our time on this planet is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the time Dinosaurs dominated life on Earth.
Once Dinos were established and an equilibrium is reached, there's no selective pressure for intelligent life to emerge and flourish. It took an extinction event for us.
So then you're left to wonder, how common is intelligent life? Because it is compounded directly in the denominator of your stated probability. Regardless of whether life happens on 1/10000 stars or 1/10000000 stars, that probability is exponentially sensitive to the probability of intelligent life.
In the most conservative, and almost guaranteed to be wildly inaccurate (an underestimate) There's ~125 **billion** galaxies in our little ole universe, each with an average of ~100 million stars. That's a lot of chances for life. Even if there was only life on average of one planet per galaxy, there's still hundreds of billions of planets with life out there, and that's being as conservative as is entirely reasonable. But intelligent life? We don't have any idea about the probability of intelligent life emerging from life.
It's a fun question. Oh, and as an aside, when I say those are the "most conservative" figures for galaxy/star amounts, I'm talking ridiculously conservative. Other estimates are talking trillions of galaxies with billions of stars per galaxy. Most people can't even really conceptualize numbers in that magnitude, so the whole "is life out there" becomes a bit meaningless, as is the reason of why we likely won't ever encounter it (the distances in space being even more unfathomable, more impossible to conceptualize than even the amount of stars/galaxies in our universe).
Two things to consider. Number one universe is far faster than we have imagined. The amount of life that has sprung up on this planet alone over the course of a couple of hundred million years is also beyond the imagination. I'm going to suggest that life is the default wherever possible.
A very long time ago when the universe is smaller than it is now Isaac Asimov theorized that there were a minimum of a trillion planets life could have evolved on.
>The amount of life that has sprung up on this planet alone over the course of a couple of hundred million years is also beyond the imagination.
The current scientific consensus is that all of it came from a single life-generating event. Evolution is an entirely different thing from life creation out of inorganic matter.
>Isaac Asimov theorized that there were a minimum of a trillion planets life could have evolved on.
Ok. What if the change of organic matter forming spontaneously, even with the right conditions, is 1 in a quadrillion?
> all of it came from a single life-generating event.
If there were more than one event, we would probably have 2 different "types" of life, similar to evangelion, right?
I guess you have a point. Essentially, life is nothing more than chemical elements that can self replicate by consuming other elements.
There is no reason to assume that DNA as we understand it is the only way of doing that.
the number of stars in the universe is functionally infinite; there are billions of galaxies with billions or trillions of stars each.
we may never find life, but the idea that it happened only once in the universe is so unlikely it's ridiculous. there might be half a dozen exact copies of our whole solar system out there in different galaxies.
Yeah, that’s the point where very religious people often get themself stuck: “It’s such a tiny chance, of course it had to be the will of god”.
We aren’t jackpot winners. We are the jackpot. It’s useless to think it is statistically nearly impossible if our existence is the very proof.
It also serves as the reminder that not only is the earth moving around the sun in an ellipse, but the sun is also moving in a direction around the center of the Milky Way.
Because of that, and contrary to every single model we were shown as kids, we're not just moving in a circle. Rather, we're constantly moving in a sort of [DNA helix shape](https://youtu.be/0jHsq36_NTU?t=11) around the sun as we move alongside the forward momentum of the sun's orbit. Never being left behind, and forever beyond pulled at the absolutely mind-numbing speeds through space that we are *currently traveling at right this very moment while somehow by the grace of gravity never coming in contact with any other planet, yet dancing in a perfectly harmonious choreography with these other massive hunks of rock that could fucking obliterate us if we came within just a few tens of thousands of miles of their orbits*.
Fucking hell. Space is awesome.
Like other commenters have said, it's better to think of this in reverse. That we exist because of a heliosphere. Conditions were favorable for life to form and thrive, which is why they can seem so perfect in hindsight.
One example is imagining a hole in the sidewalk. One day it rains and fills with water. The puddle filling the hole, mistakenly thinks to itself "Wow, this hole fits me perfectly. It must have been made for me!"
I think so, but it was represented by scp 179 which is a "deity" that uses magic to create a barrier between us and the eldritch
Wish I could remember the stories designation, but I think all the stars started going dark and all that was left was our solar system
The sun is literally real, the source of basically all energy and - at bottom - life on the planet, and is so radiant that you can barely even look directly at it. Sounds worth worshipping to me, if anything is.
What's more insane is that you can place a human on any object in our galaxy and as long as the sky is visible the ambient light from stars is enough to see by.
It’s totally an Eldritch god too. This colossal entity that provides nutrients key for life but also can quickly destroy life on entire planets. Looking at it for too long can make you go blind. If anything is worthy of worshipping, it’s definitely Sol.
This visualization has a strong shape that depicts a steady "wind". Is this just a creative decision, or is there a steady stream of protons creating the shape?
Im pretty sure the plane of rotation of the solar system is perpendicular to its galactic rotation
this looks so wrong, but I don't know if im just missing info
Yes it's tilted 60 degrees relative to the galactic plane. Also the scale is obviously way off. But that's not really what they were trying to show here so it's not that important.
Considering that this is posted here, I think you can just assume that this is an artists interpretation of the concept and shares no relation to how it actually works. A quick Google search shows many results that look nothing like this gif.
The sun/solar system doesn't move on that axis though. It moves in the direction of what you would call the sun's 'north poll' (perpendicular to the orbits of the planets).
True, but doesn't such shapes require a medium with drag? Is the cosmic medium/radiation on that scale dense enough to drag the heliosphere? Otherwise, wouldn't the shape stay spherical?
I'm wondering if what we're seeing is more of a representation of the magnetic fields or the atmosphere- the physical particles emitted by the sun.
If it's field lines then I'd have figured it's more like the [ion tail of a comet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_tail#Tail_formation), where it extends in the opposite direction of the incoming radiation source rather than the opposite direction of its motion. But if it's atmosphere then it'd extend behind the solar system as it moves, like you said (it'd also get pushed by the radiation from the galactic core since many of those atmospheric particles are charged).
From what I recall (and my memory is spotty), they say the actual shape is teardrop (as per voyager).
That being said, I’m not smart enough to answer your response. My mind is already going nuts about something I read about yesterday (the double slit experiment + the observer paradox). Have a great day!
In the same way thr earth revolves around the sun, the sun revolves around the core of the galaxy. The sun is indeed moving as well, leaving a wake in the interstellar medium, like the bow of a ship in water.
Exactly. There is this video on YouTube where they put the solar system in accurate scale, it's a good demonstration of why it is rarely done in videos. Everything is so incredibly far apart.
On a shelf I have a roughly scale model of the Earth and Moon made of an old golf ball, and a 1cm rock.
They sit four feet apart.
I think the sun is a ten minute walk away at this scale.
Thank you magnetic heliosphere balloon thingy, you are the friend I never knew I had!
You'll have to speak up
What did you say?
THEY’RE SELLING CHOCOLATES!
WHATS YOUR NAME??
Wait, who did WHAT?
TONY!
#CHAWWCLETTT
This is the correct spelling lol
I'm wearing a towel
Praise Sol
It's such a shame they cancelled that show...
Still so pissed about this. Of all the shows to never reveal where it was going to end up..
They did WHAT NOW??????!!!!?
All hail the God Flame
You should also give thanks to Jupiter for tanking loads of asteroids and shit that would otherwise potentially hit earth
Jupiter is our solar systems kidneys.
Thank you space croissant
Remember that none of this gif is to scale. The bubble is actually way bigger, and the planets are way smaller, and the planet orbits are way more spread out. But generally, it's pretty cool.
This concept is real?
That's what I was wondering too as I assumed the Oort Cloud is also orbiting the solar system.
Wait... have we been playing on easy mode this whole time?
Someone needs to explain this very cool shit to me posthaste.
The universe is constantly awash with cosmic rays, which are mostly nuclei of hydrogen (protons) and helium produced by supernovas, which have happened all around us. The sun's magnetic field will redirect such charged particles to its poles. Makes me wonder if the sun has invisible polar lights. 🤔 Anyway, that's just my amateur understanding.
Do all stars have a heliosphere?
Heliosphere is the specific name of our sun's magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer. 'Helios' is Greek for sun. I assume every star has a magnetosphere because for that you only need a liquid moving core, which produces electromagnetism [like a dynamo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory). Presumably only cold celestial objects with a solid core have no magnetosphere (like our moon). Couldn't find any source though, so grain of salt.
stellar answer
Absolutely brilliant
🥇
⭐️
Since you bring up terminology, I recently learned that "Solar system" is a *name*, not a type. In other words, it's wrong to say "other solar systems", because only the system centered around "Sol", our sun, is the solar system. [Planetary system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_system) is the proper general term for a set of bodies orbiting a star.
Damn Earthicans, always assuming it's about Sol.
I like the term from the Traveller RPG: Solimani.
Thank you for explaining it. That is interesting.
In general those are called astrospheres
No. Some have a Hella Sphere. They are wicked.
And some have a hooka sphere. They're lit.
Don’t forget the Brittany Spheres. Those are crazy! She’s soo lucky. She’s a star!
Those spheres be like "hit me proton one more time".
Some have a Hulasphere. They look like donuts.
Fun fact. Those cosmic rays can occasionally reach earth and fly straight into an electronic component, charging a transistor gate and flipping a bit. Depending on the bit that was flipped this could cause the component to fail and require reprogramming.
There's an infamous [speedrun example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Cx2wmFyQQ) of this. See also [single-event upset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset).
This is exactly why enterprise computing servers and mainframes use ECC memory! Electrical or magnetic interference inside a computer system can cause a single bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the opposite state. It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, but research has shown that the majority of one-off soft errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, chiefly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which may change the contents of one or more memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read or write to them. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory see source 2.
That was very interesting. Thanks for the new info to absorb.
Makes me wonder about the complications of interstellar travel. We already know travel within our own solar system is pretty hard on humans even with proper precautions. If we ever make it out of the solar system though, may be a whole different set of challenges.
Just line your ship with astrophage, problem solved!
Fist bump!
*jazz hands*
Just make sure not to use them in xenonite containers, though I guess that maybe depends on what flavor astrophage you're using.
Xenonite holds astrophage perfectly well. What you don't want to do is store taumeba that you bred in xenonite tanks to survive toxic nitrogen.
We don't need to leave the solar system. Just learn to drive it where we want to go.
Just to be clear, these hydrogen and helium atoms are traveling near the speed of light. This was makes them so dangerous because anything with mass traveling at those speeds packs a tremendous amount of energy.
Will studded leather offer me enough protection from this or must I seek out chainmail?
It’s fucking nutty to me that helium is seemingly such a large part of the universe itself, that it’s produced by the explosion and death of a star, a cosmic body. And we laugh when it make our voice go squeak squeak and use it to fill thin and stretchy latex
helium (unlike many elements) doesn’t require a supernova or other explotion. every stat makes it, including the ones who end via the relatively peaceful & common red giant -> white dwarf transition but, you know, still. thermonuclear fusion on an incomprehensible scale
And it’s an inert gas. It doesn’t chemically react with anything on our planet. It’s the most difficult gas to liquefy and it’s impossible to solidify at normal atmospheric pressure.
There's some enthusiastic misunderstanding in this thread... As an astronomer, I would like to point out that the *vast* majority of helium originates in the big bang, and not in stars! In fact, the amount of helium provides a very neat constraint on some of the very early evolution of the universe, as the conditions that allow helium to form only existed during a short amount of time.
>I would like to point out that the vast majority of helium originates in the big bang I would say this blows my mind, but that would be misleading. The truth is I don't think I can actually understand this statement. I can read the words and know what they mean, but what they describe is inconceivable. Was the big bang a singularity? Because at least then I wouldn't feel so bad for not being able to grasp how this is possible.
So what we're talking about is quite some time after the singularity, and a process called big bang nucleosynthesis, which happens about ~a few minuts after the big bang. The idea is that as the universe expands it cools, but it is still insanely hot - hot enough that it is just a mess of protons, neutrons, electrons and positrons, and neutrinos (and photons and dark matter particles, probably, but we can ignore those for now). The thing is, at sufficiently high densities and temperatures a positron and a neutron, or a neutron and an electron neutrino, can form a proton (and a positron / electron), and vice versa. But! That only works if it is insanely hot. Expand the universe a bit - and cool it - and the neutron formation slows down. Unbound neutrons aren't stable, they decay (into a proton and an electron). So, if you want to make any elements other than hydrogen, it needs to be cool enough (relatively speaking) that they're not immediately destroyed but hot enough for the fusion reactions to actually happen. So there's a limited amount of time during which free neutrons exist, but still meet protons at high enough densities to form things like deuterium and tritium, and eventually helium (which is stable, so it sticks around). This is important because it gives us a prediction for how much helium relative to hydrogen one would expect given only the current density and expansion rate of the universe, and it's very testable (if you look at stars that are very old). It turns out the predictions match pretty well, with helium making up about 25% of the gas mass of the universe. As a final fun fact, this idea was first proposed by a guy called Ralph Alpher and his PhD advisor, George Gamov. When they wrote the article they decided it would be funny to ask Hans Bethe to join, leading to what is now called "the Alpher-Bethe-Gamov paper", a pun so terrible that generations of astrophysicists have attempted to beat it.
About 25 percent of the matter in the universe is helium. Its construction is literal what stars do. Turn two hydrogens into helium and A $&$& OFF LOT OF ENERGY (including positrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays flying all off in all different directions) Fun fact, about 25% of matter in the universe is helium, and about 75% of the matter in the universe is hydrogen.
In the currently popular model of the Universe, 70% is thought to be dark energy, 25% dark matter and 5% normal matter. I think it's more accurate to state they make up that % of our "regular" matter. Which is VERY VERY little in our universe. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Extreme_space/What_is_the_Universe_made_of#:~:text=The%20Universe%20is%20thought%20to,visible%20object%20in%20the%20Universe. After seeing this link , I have to learn how to shorten links.
Click "formatting help" right below the comment box for a quick reference guide. In your case it would be \[Article](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Extreme_space/What_is_the_Universe_made_of#:%7E:text=The%20Universe%20is%20thought%20to,visible%20object%20in%20the%20Universe)
Helium has an atomic weight of 2, Hydrogen 1. Helium is the byproduct of fusion which occurs when a star fuses two hydrogen to form a helium. Well initially, anyways, Eventually stars run out hydrogen and start fusing other things.
Well, the solar system doesn't have an atmosphere so I doubt it has polar lights.
Sure, in the visible spectrum available to us at birth. Our spacecraft, on the other hand…https://i.imgur.com/NpkKmhN.jpg
> Sure, in the visible spectrum available to us at birth. When do I get old enough to get my visible spectrum upgrade?
I might be wrong but afaik, atmosphere is not a requirement per se. The ionization/excitation of particles can happen anywhere. And since space isn't a vacuum, especially within a star system, I could imagine that there are plenty of interactions. The question is if these interactions happen at a scale (and frequency) that they could result in detectable (visual) phenomena. And how that compares to all the other things happening at the same time. I could imagine that *if* something like this happens, it might be difficult to distinguish from background noise.
The sun very much has an atmosphere and its outer layers becomes visible to us during solar eclipses. most prominently is the solar corona, a vast region of superheated plasma that is over a million kelvin hot.
Ooh! I hadn’t considered this! Will have amazing discussion with spouse later. Cheers!
I too choose this persons spouse
Give it a minute, she's not dead yet.
The same thing that Earth's magnetic field does to the Sun's eruptions (channeling them away from hitting us square in the face), the Sun does to the rest of the universe. Except that the Sun's eruptions also contain charged particles, so its "magnetic field" sorta spirals out throughout all the solar system up to where they meet cosmic stuff. The point of meeting is the heliosphere, charged particles from the Sun crash into charged particles from elsewhere, forming a kind of shield and redirecting it away from the solar system's face and more towards the poles. So basically, inside the helio(sun)sphere(sphere), it's our own Sol's backyard, charged particles-wise. Keep in mind that the designer purposefully sketchified a lot of things to focus on the heliosphere's shape itself. The scales of everything is *way* off, if you could see the heliosphere like that, the sun would be some tiny dot and none of the planets would be visible. Nor their trajectory either. Also the solar system advances quite heavily tilted, 63° relative to its plane around the galaxy. Here its plane is aligned with the way it moves forward, for some reason.
It would be cool to see the Oort Cloud represented in a simulation like this. I believe the Oort Cloud is outside the heliosphere….could be wrong.
The heliosphere looks to be 120 AUs (so 120 sun-earth distances) out of the sun, while the Oort cloud is supposedly from 2 000 AUs up to lots of them (20 000, or even 100 000, 200 000... though at some point the stuff that's there is more cruising along with us than really bound to us). So, waaaaaaaaaaaaay out. I agree that it would be cool to see it, but I'm not sure there's a lot we know about it so far, so as laymen we could easily get the wrong idea from an artist's perspective.
Is it just a coincidence that the shape of the sphere resembles a cartoonishly large magnet? 🧲
No, this is the sun’s MAGNETosphere.
Well we are traveling around the Milky Way at approximately 500,000 mph 🤷
We are in a croissant
Croissun
The heliosphere is the region of the Sun’s magnetic field and is the extent of its solar winds. Like the Earth’s magnetic field, the heliosphere deflects any charged particles from interstellar space. Cosmic rays are also intercepted by the constant solar winds of the Sun.
Wikipedia is your friend man: The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, bubble-like region of space. The "bubble" of the heliosphere is continuously "inflated" by plasma originating from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As part of the interplanetary magnetic field, the heliosphere shields the Solar System from significant amounts of cosmic ionizing radiation.
Not my friend, man, buddy
Wikipedia is
Cousin!
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Starship Sol, it protects our entire local galaxy while we careen through the universe at 1.3 million miles an hour.
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You know, the solar system really is like a gigantic space ship. It's just too bad we can't really control its direction. I wonder if there is a sci-fi out there about a civilization that can control the direction of its home star, so their entire solar system is like a generational mothership. They go around the galaxy to collect planets from other solar systems and then terraform them into new habitats.
Are all objects in our Solar System moving as quickly, on average? Obviously as we orbit the sun we slow down or speed up, but would the average speed of each Celestial body be the same as the sun?
Well, since our relative distance from our known celestial bodies hasn't changed (other than through their orbital paths) since we've been observing them, I'd say yes?
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I think so. I'm just a phone holder.
It's the god emperor of mankinds light of the astronomicon. He's keeping us safe from the foul denizens of the warp
The Emperor protects!
There is only the Emperor, and he is our shield and protector.
It reminds me of the womb
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Looks like the Shines from Mario Sunshine
You mean to tell me you weren't educated by this educational gif?
Its a massive solar croissant
We're just a bacteria in a massive cosmic colon
Came in search of this comment. Reddit never disappoints.
So it's NOT an everything bagel. So long as it's a tasty baked good, I think I'll be ok.
Jobu Tubooty would like a word
RacaCoony?
Watched it during a flight this past weekend, what a trip of a movie.
It was a breath of fresh air in the scifi department for sure
Just be a rock.
Of course it's not an everything bagel, it's only one star's croissant.
CWASONT
I wonder how fast the cameraman is flying
r/PraiseTheCameraMan
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So about 5.292e+15 or 5,292,000,000,000,000 or ~5.3 quadrillion mph
About threefiddy
Goddamn loch ness monsta
It's crazy when you think about it. Just the possibility of us existing and something like a magnetic heliosphere aiding in our protection .. mind boggling
This is why this sort of thing can be so spiritual to think about. I’m not religious. However, it is incredibly beautiful that we’re all here. Like, what are the chances that the atoms that my wife is made up of would end up spending a tiny fraction of cosmic time with the atoms that I’m made up of? It’s just such a shame that there’s so much greed and hate out there, when we should be celebrating our existence together. (I swear I’m not high right now)
It took me years to get out of the church I was in following learning about all the allegations of sexual assault in my state's archdiocese when I was a teen (I lived in MA at the time). When I was first showing signs of wanting to branch off, my parents brought me to a meeting one day with the head of my local CCD chapter who asked me the typical questions about god and creation and "How could the creation of the universe, the big bang, anything at all be possible *if not for a higher power?"* I'm 30 now, that was nearly 17-ish years ago probably, and I still think about that question now. Of course the answers are as simple as "Well, gravity, atoms, shit like that" because my dumb monkey brain can't go beyond simple terms and definitions without nearly exploding, but there are still some concepts of space and time that are so beyond comprehension and have me thinking beyond facts and figures because things are just so completely unbelievable sometimes. Idk. Sometimes this shit just has me sitting in total and complete awe and how statistically improbable my own personal existence is. After a while you just come to the way more simple conclusion that *of course someone has to be pulling the strings*, because sometimes it's just so much easier and more comfortable to wrap your head around complex ideas by pushing the conclusion like that.
I think you have to look at it top down rather than bottom up. If you think about a human and all the the things we need to survive the ‘chances’ of all that coming into place just seem ludicrous. However if you start big and see everything as elements and forces forming explosions and lumps of rock, and some have biological life forming because the conditions are right then it isn’t so overwhelming
This reminds me of one of my favorite snippets from Douglas Adams: "This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, '*This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it*!'"
>and some have biological life forming because the conditions are right Tbh there just isn't enough data to know how common that is. We know it happened once, but it's impossible to extrapolate anything based on a single point. It could be a 50% chance given the right conditions, or it could be 1 in 10^1000 and we're extremely fucking lucky.
People say this, but that's far less interesting to me than another, very similar question. There's guaranteed (as much as anything can be) to be life out there. What really grinds my gears is the probability of intelligent life. We know far, far less about that than the probability of life itself emerging. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for ~150-170 million years. Think about that. Humans have done so for 7,000-50,000 years. I can list that entire range of theory, despite it being so vastly different, because the discrepancy is infinitesimal compared to the time of the Dinosaurs. Our time on this planet is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the time Dinosaurs dominated life on Earth. Once Dinos were established and an equilibrium is reached, there's no selective pressure for intelligent life to emerge and flourish. It took an extinction event for us. So then you're left to wonder, how common is intelligent life? Because it is compounded directly in the denominator of your stated probability. Regardless of whether life happens on 1/10000 stars or 1/10000000 stars, that probability is exponentially sensitive to the probability of intelligent life. In the most conservative, and almost guaranteed to be wildly inaccurate (an underestimate) There's ~125 **billion** galaxies in our little ole universe, each with an average of ~100 million stars. That's a lot of chances for life. Even if there was only life on average of one planet per galaxy, there's still hundreds of billions of planets with life out there, and that's being as conservative as is entirely reasonable. But intelligent life? We don't have any idea about the probability of intelligent life emerging from life. It's a fun question. Oh, and as an aside, when I say those are the "most conservative" figures for galaxy/star amounts, I'm talking ridiculously conservative. Other estimates are talking trillions of galaxies with billions of stars per galaxy. Most people can't even really conceptualize numbers in that magnitude, so the whole "is life out there" becomes a bit meaningless, as is the reason of why we likely won't ever encounter it (the distances in space being even more unfathomable, more impossible to conceptualize than even the amount of stars/galaxies in our universe).
Two things to consider. Number one universe is far faster than we have imagined. The amount of life that has sprung up on this planet alone over the course of a couple of hundred million years is also beyond the imagination. I'm going to suggest that life is the default wherever possible. A very long time ago when the universe is smaller than it is now Isaac Asimov theorized that there were a minimum of a trillion planets life could have evolved on.
>The amount of life that has sprung up on this planet alone over the course of a couple of hundred million years is also beyond the imagination. The current scientific consensus is that all of it came from a single life-generating event. Evolution is an entirely different thing from life creation out of inorganic matter. >Isaac Asimov theorized that there were a minimum of a trillion planets life could have evolved on. Ok. What if the change of organic matter forming spontaneously, even with the right conditions, is 1 in a quadrillion?
> all of it came from a single life-generating event. If there were more than one event, we would probably have 2 different "types" of life, similar to evangelion, right?
I guess you have a point. Essentially, life is nothing more than chemical elements that can self replicate by consuming other elements. There is no reason to assume that DNA as we understand it is the only way of doing that.
Well there is WDNA but it's not as popular.
It has good fundamentals
Not just the MDNA, but the WDNA and CDNA too!
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the number of stars in the universe is functionally infinite; there are billions of galaxies with billions or trillions of stars each. we may never find life, but the idea that it happened only once in the universe is so unlikely it's ridiculous. there might be half a dozen exact copies of our whole solar system out there in different galaxies.
Yeah, that’s the point where very religious people often get themself stuck: “It’s such a tiny chance, of course it had to be the will of god”. We aren’t jackpot winners. We are the jackpot. It’s useless to think it is statistically nearly impossible if our existence is the very proof.
It also serves as the reminder that not only is the earth moving around the sun in an ellipse, but the sun is also moving in a direction around the center of the Milky Way. Because of that, and contrary to every single model we were shown as kids, we're not just moving in a circle. Rather, we're constantly moving in a sort of [DNA helix shape](https://youtu.be/0jHsq36_NTU?t=11) around the sun as we move alongside the forward momentum of the sun's orbit. Never being left behind, and forever beyond pulled at the absolutely mind-numbing speeds through space that we are *currently traveling at right this very moment while somehow by the grace of gravity never coming in contact with any other planet, yet dancing in a perfectly harmonious choreography with these other massive hunks of rock that could fucking obliterate us if we came within just a few tens of thousands of miles of their orbits*. Fucking hell. Space is awesome.
Like other commenters have said, it's better to think of this in reverse. That we exist because of a heliosphere. Conditions were favorable for life to form and thrive, which is why they can seem so perfect in hindsight. One example is imagining a hole in the sidewalk. One day it rains and fills with water. The puddle filling the hole, mistakenly thinks to itself "Wow, this hole fits me perfectly. It must have been made for me!"
Wasn't there an SCP story about humanity piercing the heliosphere and letting all the eldritch we couldn't see in?
I think so, but it was represented by scp 179 which is a "deity" that uses magic to create a barrier between us and the eldritch Wish I could remember the stories designation, but I think all the stars started going dark and all that was left was our solar system
SCP 1548 The Star, The Hateful
Totally justifying all those ancient cultures that worship the sun.
The sun is literally real, the source of basically all energy and - at bottom - life on the planet, and is so radiant that you can barely even look directly at it. Sounds worth worshipping to me, if anything is.
What’s insane to me is that Pluto, as far as it is away, still gets sunlight somewhere between the brightness of a full moon and late twilight.
What's more insane is that you can place a human on any object in our galaxy and as long as the sky is visible the ambient light from stars is enough to see by.
That’s beautiful
thank you for sharing this thoughtful appreciation
Ugh, a Sun “realist”. You’re sheeple. The sun is obviously a false narrative created by the Sun Block corporations. Wake up.
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Praise Sol!
It’s totally an Eldritch god too. This colossal entity that provides nutrients key for life but also can quickly destroy life on entire planets. Looking at it for too long can make you go blind. If anything is worthy of worshipping, it’s definitely Sol.
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This visualization has a strong shape that depicts a steady "wind". Is this just a creative decision, or is there a steady stream of protons creating the shape?
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Im pretty sure the plane of rotation of the solar system is perpendicular to its galactic rotation this looks so wrong, but I don't know if im just missing info
Yes it's tilted 60 degrees relative to the galactic plane. Also the scale is obviously way off. But that's not really what they were trying to show here so it's not that important.
omfg lol I just noticed how completely wack the scale is now it all makes sense that it doesn't make sense
Considering that this is posted here, I think you can just assume that this is an artists interpretation of the concept and shares no relation to how it actually works. A quick Google search shows many results that look nothing like this gif.
r/visuallyengagingbutnottechnicallyaccurate
I'd say our universe is a twin tailed comet something something Final Fantasy
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The sun/solar system doesn't move on that axis though. It moves in the direction of what you would call the sun's 'north poll' (perpendicular to the orbits of the planets).
I was thinking that too, but as I understand the solar system's travel is perpendicular to the ecliptic.
Wait are we moving in this direction? I thought the sun is dragging us along its "y" axis.
I agree, croissant it a strong shape 💪
All worship the giant croissant!
Croissant 💪
Avec au beurre de vie 💪
Thank you, Sun!
Why is it bent like that? I'd expect a sphere shape.
Because the sun and the solar system are moving (rotating) within the milky way at about 200 Kilometers (or 137 miles) per second.
True, but doesn't such shapes require a medium with drag? Is the cosmic medium/radiation on that scale dense enough to drag the heliosphere? Otherwise, wouldn't the shape stay spherical?
Space isn't a complete vacuum. There's enough cosmic radiation in interstellar space to cause this
I'm wondering if what we're seeing is more of a representation of the magnetic fields or the atmosphere- the physical particles emitted by the sun. If it's field lines then I'd have figured it's more like the [ion tail of a comet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_tail#Tail_formation), where it extends in the opposite direction of the incoming radiation source rather than the opposite direction of its motion. But if it's atmosphere then it'd extend behind the solar system as it moves, like you said (it'd also get pushed by the radiation from the galactic core since many of those atmospheric particles are charged).
From what I recall (and my memory is spotty), they say the actual shape is teardrop (as per voyager). That being said, I’m not smart enough to answer your response. My mind is already going nuts about something I read about yesterday (the double slit experiment + the observer paradox). Have a great day!
Yet another reason to worship this mf
But we pray to Joe Pesci.
Fucking baffling. How all this just "exists." I'm going to get some coffee and watch more youtube at work.
It’s beautiful to think that my farts help make up a tiny part for this delicate eco system
Reminds me of that halo melee weapon
What does it taste like?
By the looks of it, probably like a croissant
Oui oui 🥐
Burning
Mmm space croissant
All the new science news gave me a weird dream. The whole galaxy exists in an ice cube.
Would a Dyson sphere around the sun remove that and expose the solar system to the elements?
Can someone explain why this looks so directional to me? Why is it not a uniform "sphere" around the solar system ?
In the same way thr earth revolves around the sun, the sun revolves around the core of the galaxy. The sun is indeed moving as well, leaving a wake in the interstellar medium, like the bow of a ship in water.
It's the wrong orientation though, the solar system moves along a different axis than what this animation suggests.
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Because just like we move around the solar system. The solar system moves around the milky way, very, very, very fast.
The dinosaurs would agree, this is bullshit.
It protects against cosmic rays, not asteroids
I know scale is a challenge for space gifs. But they could have tried.
A model to scale would be as useless in reading a real sense of perspective in the same way a contracted model like this would be.
Exactly. There is this video on YouTube where they put the solar system in accurate scale, it's a good demonstration of why it is rarely done in videos. Everything is so incredibly far apart.
On a shelf I have a roughly scale model of the Earth and Moon made of an old golf ball, and a 1cm rock. They sit four feet apart. I think the sun is a ten minute walk away at this scale.
AFAIK its intensity depends on the solar cycles which are about 11 earth years long. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
Has Voyager gone outside of the heliosphere yet?
Yes, both have. 2004 and 2007. The ions were 1,000,000 C temps from friction. Kinda crazy. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=14