Space Face

[waddlededede]

A wave of cosmological curiosity passed over me this morning and I wanted to get an idea as to the sort of distances we're talking about when we refer to say "the nearest star" to our own. You can pick up the figures anywhere but I couldn't find any actual diagrammatic representations, so I decided to make them myself

Comments

[waddlededede]

Yeah, I know what you mean; I simply used the circles in that way to give an idea of the scale of the distance in question; I rather suspect that Alpha Centauri is not, in actual fact, straight across from a Neptunian orbit as depicted. Okay, let's just pretend the circles there are not circles at all, but spheres. Neptunian orbit-sized spheres. That eliminates the 3D problem. But like I say, I was interested in scale more than direction.

By the way, Pluto's been declassified as a planet. :P
But the reason I used Neptune instead was because Pluto's orbit is (as your picture nicely demonstrates) somewhat more eccentric than that of Neptune. A (more or less) circular orbit is easier for my brain to cope with. ;)

Planet Blank

[waddlededede]

That's quite interesting; I hadn't realised there'd been any contention on the matter! I'd assumed it to be an accepted revision not unlike previous ones (it's not, so far as I know, the first time the word "planet" has been redefined; it used to be equally applicable to the (exo-solar) stars, the sun and the moon). But whatever, as far as I'm concerned, the fact we no longer call it a planet doesn't make Pluto any less interesting or worthy of study, it's just mucking about with semantics, really. Something which the English language frequently invites us to do... ;)

Also: you flatter me, sir. Don't do it too much or my ego might cause an interstellar explosion. :)

[anonymous]

(tomew)

Hmmm, fascinating way of representing it - space is, it would seem, really big.