# Tag Info

62

The Sun is immensely loud. The surface generates thousands to tens of thousands of watts of sound power for every square meter. That's something like 10x to 100x the power flux through the speakers at a rock concert, or out the front of a police siren. Except the "speaker surface" in this case is the entire surface of the Sun, some 10,000 times larger than ...

34

They do, but due to the ratio of masses being vastly different, they seem like they would not to do so as moon seems to rotate just around (the centre of) Earth. The ratio of Earth and Moon's masses is $\frac{M_{Earth}}{M_{Moon}} = 81.3$ whereas for Pluto and Charon the same ratio is $\frac{M_{Pluto}}{M_{Charon}} = 8.09$. Because the ratio for Pluto and ...

32

You are correct. The Earth would always appear in approximately the same location in the sky, when viewed from a point on the lunar surface. And it would be seen to spin, the continents coming in and out of view over the course of an Earth day (24 hours). The sun would make it's way across the sky, from one horizon to the other over a period of about two ...

26

There are a few incorrect assumptions in your post, so it is difficult to answer as asked. But I can address the misconceptions. 1. The seasons are not caused by the distance from the sun The seasons are caused by the 23.5° tilt in Earth's axis. When the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the sun (summer), the Southern Hemisphere is simultaneously tilted ...

23

Still new at stellarium but here are some quick capture gif lasting one month. Sorry about the quality- limited to 256 colors for smaller gifs. Date on lower left corner. By the way the sun is of course the brightest and i use it as reference for recording (start record when sun is in frame then stop when it appears again in the same position which is ...

22

Not strictly satellites/moons, but certainly companions are 2010 TK7 with a diameter of ~300 m, an Earth trojan at the L4 point, and the ~5 km 3753 Cruithne in a peculiar orbit locked to the Earth's.

21

There is currently only one planet known to be capable of supporting human life, and you're on it. Several planets have been found in the region in which we expect water to be liquid on much of the planet. Of these, only one fits the criteria of being Earth-sized and well placed in the habitable zone: Kepler 186-f However we know nothing about it's ...

20

Our atmosphere is only transparent to visible light, In most other wavelengths, some or all of the light is absorbed Image from Wikipedia, adapted from image by NASA Our eyes have evolved to take advantage of the transparency at these wavelengths. If we had evolved in an atmosphere with a very different mix of gases. One in which visible light was ...

18

The coincidence isn't so much that they appear very similar sizes from Earth, but that we are alive to see them at the point in time in which they appear very similar sizes. The moon is slowly moving away from the Earth, and at some point in the future the moon will be unable to totally eclipse the sun and conversely, if you could step far into prehistory, ...

18

What you're asking, basically, is whether there are any proofs for the heliocentric model of the Solar System. A literal naked-eye observation of the Earth revolving around the Sun would be rather difficult, since human beings have never gone to another planet yet, and have only been to the Moon briefly, decades ago. Here are several proofs; some of them ...

16

First up, the tilt is exactly 23.45 degrees. The reason for Earth's tilt is still not yet really proven, but scientists at Princeton stated on August 25, 2006 that planet Earth may have 'tilted' to keep its balance. Quote: By analyzing the magnetic composition of ancient sediments found in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Princeton ...

14

To add to Mark Bailey's answer; the Earth would indeed hang in the sky and rotate, but it would also wax and wane over the course of a lunar day (27.3 Earth-days). Starting at lunar dawn, the Earth would be half-full. The Earth would then wane (more shadow) towards lunar noon. At lunar noon, the Earth would be all in shadow (New Earth) and quite close to ...

14

A moon is held together by its own gravity, and pulled apart by the tidal action of a planet. If a moon comes too close to a planet it will be ripped apart by the planet's gravity and become a ring. The closest a moon can come to a planet is known as the Roche limit, and it is dependent on the mass and density of the planet and moon. A large planet, such as ...

14

On barycentres The Pluto-Charon couple is not qualitatively different to the Earth-Moon couple with regards to orbits. As was pointed out in other answers, in both cases, the two bodies revolve around each other, i.e. they are best described as orbiting around their barycentre. In more physical terms, the referential centred on the barycentre of the ...

13

The precise presolar history isn't known. I'll try to tell a likely story backward in time. Our sun probably has brothers and sisters scattered throughout the Milky Way. Further back in time our sun likely was part of on open star cluster like the Hyades. Open star clusters are not stable and eject stars over hundreds of millions of years. (More about ...

13

One kilometer, no way! That would've been known since long ago. Most asteroids of that size have already been found, all the way out to the asteroid belt beyond Mars. Earth has no second Moon. But there are always some tiny asteroids around, which are temporarily captured by Earth's gravity. Here's a funny illustration of such an orbit, it is not what we ...

12

The Moon has an orbital eccentricity of 0.0549, so its path around the Earth is not perfectly circular and the distance between the Earth and the Moon will vary from the Earth's frame of reference (Perigee at 363,295 km and apogee at 405,503 km), see for example second animation explaining Lunar librations in this answer. But its orbit can be said, in an ...

12

My understanding is that the Earth's axis points in the same direction in space during its entire orbit around the sun. And this is what causes our seasons. The second statement is correct. The axial tilt is the primary driver of the seasons. The first statement is not exactly correct. There is a small but persistent change in the orientation of the ...

11

This is referred to as diurnal motion, due to Earth's rotation on its axis, and it affects apparent motion of stars differently depending on their position on the skies relative to the axis of Earth's rotation. For example, on northern hemisphere, the star that appears not to move at all is positioned so that the earth's axis of rotation points directly ...

11

As HDE 226868 noted in his answer, the Sun is not going to go supernova. That's something only large stars experience at the end of their main sequence life. Our Sun is a dwarf star. It's not big enough to do that. It will instead expand to be a red giant when it burns out the hydrogen at the very core of the Sun. It will continue burning hydrogen as a red ...

11

It's highly doubtful you could see any normal light source on the surface of the earth. Using $$\text{brightness} = \frac{\text{luminosity}}{4 \pi \times \text{distance}^2}$$ (with brightness in watts, and luminosity in watts per square meter. and distance to moon of $3.84 \times 10^8$ meters.) Try a hypothetical light source 100 megawatts output, all ...

10

Gravity assists such as this are a form of elastic collision. There's a bit of number crunching here (hopefully no mistakes!), so you'll want to be familiar with the basics of momentum, kinetic energy, and the conservation thereof. Question: If Ceres (the largest known asteroid and nearly 500 km in diameter) used Earth to perform a gravity assist to ...

10

So would the Moon's magnetic field affect the Earth's magnetic field, just as its gravitational pull affects Earth's gravitational pull for oceans? Yes, but only slightly. Firstly, magnetic fields can superimpose, so the field at any point is the sum of the field due to the Earth and the field due to the moon. However, the moon is rather far away (and ...

10

Eclipses are common, but solar eclipses like the ones our moon causes would be unusual since it takes a combination of factors, the angular size of the moon and sun are nearly the same from the viewpoint of Earth so that the moon (depending on where it is in its slightly ellipitcal path around the Earth) can cover the sun nearly exactly. NASA has a nice ...

10

Pretty much every planet with a moon can have eclipses - you'll have seen photographs of Saturn with shadows cast from its moons, like this one from wodumedia.com: If you were in a balloon where that shadow is, you would see a solar eclipse. It wouldn't be as exciting as from Earth, as the Sun would appear so much smaller from this distance. If you want ...

10

The effect is called apparent retrograde motion. What happens is that Mars has a 'direction opposite to that of other bodies within its system as observed from a particular vantage point' when this loop occurs. That's a bunch of words that don't mean a lot to me. A picture is worth a thousand clearer words: (Imagine this turned sideways and you get the ...

10

The strength of the Earth's gravitational field compared to the Moon and the Sun is not enough to capture and hold satellites - there are too many disruptive forces that would rip them away over time. However there are some objects at the Lagrangian points - the points where the gravitational fields of the Earth and other objects are equal and so it is ...

10

It would look like this (actual picture of the Earth, seen from the Moon, during a lunar eclipse): Link to full page: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140407.html The Earth would appear surrounded by a bright ring, even though the Sun is completely hidden behind it. The ring is sunlight refracted through the atmosphere. It's basically all the sunrises and ...

10

Without checking the numbers in detail, according to Wikipedia, the volume of the observable universe is about $3.5\cdot 10^{80} \mbox{ m}^3$, and the volume of Earth is about $1.08321\cdot 10^{21} \mbox{ m}^3$. By dividing the two volumes we get a factor of $3.2\cdot 10^{59}$, or written as decimal number: The observable comoving volume of the universe is ...

10

It is a co-incidence. The units are what you need to look at, in both the speed of light and the distance of the Sun the units of length are the same (m) (your ratio is $\approx 0.002 s^{-1}$ when you use metres as the unit for the distance to the Sun). The definition of the second is in a sense arbitrary and is a consequence of how we have chosen to ...

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