Kypickles space fact of the day: fact 15

The single most massive, biggest object within a 20 light year radius of us (that’s extremely close in stellar distances) is a star called Procyon. It’s a white sub giant star 11 light years away. It is easily visible from Earth at night. Procyon has a second, smaller star orbiting around it.

Talking to animals would be the most useless superpower to have
I keep seeing people like "omg i rly want to talk to my cat!!1" and I'm here to crush your dreams

animals don't have languages. When a dog barks at you for food, that dog isn't saying "give me food!" or even "food! food!" it's equivalent to a human grunting. Like a baby crying. It's not communicating in words, its making random sounds to convey the feelings it has. So even if you could talk to your dog you couldn't have a conversation. It'd be like trying to talk to a caveman.

The only exception I see for this is whales or dolphins, but dolphins are the spawn of satan himself and whale language will still be completely unintelligible to your human ears. Grammar would be all over the place.

So yeah, talking to animals would be completely useless and not at all entertaining or beneficial.

GUYS
PEOPLE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS ENOUGH
YOU HAVE THE OPPURTUNITY RIGHT NOW TO OFFICIALLY NAME A PLANET
MORE INFO HERE: https://www.nameexoworlds.iau.org/2022edition


I can't believe people aren't talking about this
these are real planets, and you could officially name one of them

https://discord.gg/bDf25pnR

I'm starting up a discord server for space, as well as some geography stuff and just creative stuff in general

there will be some general and memes stuff too

pls join

Alright, I want to clear a giant misconception people somehow still believe today
"we only use 10% of our brains!"
that is completely not true, and I'll tell you where that actually came from.
As people were first studying the brain, there were so many mysteries people didn't understand. Someone published a scientific paper, where in it, they say, "The brain is so complex, we only know what 10% of it does."

people took that and believed he said that we only used 10% of our brains.
THIS IS NOT TRUE. WE USE WAY MORE THAN 10% OF OUR BRAINS.

please share this post with anyone who needs to hear it

kypickles space fact of day: day 14
not really a fact but here’s a new image by the hubble telescope, and it’s my new favorite
www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-views-a-turbulent-stellar-nursery/

Kypickles space fact of the day: day 3
wanna visit the scariest planet in the known universe?
it’s called HD 189733 B. Obviously, it hasn’t been given an official name yet. I’ll be calling it HD for short.

HD is a gas giant bigger than jupiter that orbits so close to its star that it’s temperature is thousands of degrees, hotter than some stars. It’s the first exoplanet we ever got a heat map of, if i’m remembering correctly.
We also know that a large part of its atmosphere is made of vaporized rock, and it has winds 7x faster than the speed of sound.
But that’s not the worst part yet.
It rains glass.
Molten glass.
Sideways.

The heat and pressure is high enough to turn the rock gas into molten glass, and this glass is picked up by the wind and speeds around the atmosphere faster than sound. So, it rains sideways. Basically, it’s hell, and absolutely nothing is surviving falling into this thing.

The ironic part is, on the outside, the planet is blue and white, and it almost looks like a calm ocean planet.

kypickles space fact of the day: day 12
a quick one since i don’t have much time
earths moon is the fifth biggest moon in the solar system

which is weird because the other four are around gas giants

earth has a moon that’s so big they’re only found around gas giants

strange

kypickles space fact of the day: day 11
jupiter nearly killed us all
so i’m continuing the trend from the last few days about the solar systems formation

when the planets were forming, their orbits were constantly changing around. None of the planets formed in their current orbits.
well, jupiter probably formed way further out. Like, where neptune is today. But because it was the first, it quickly began eating all the dust around it, and spiraling inward toward the sun.
jupiter began eating all the protoplanets nearby. It kept moving further and further inward, towards earth.

if saturn hadn’t formed, jupiter would’ve eaten the entire inner solar system, and earth would’ve never formed.
saturn formed, and jupiter was pulled back by saturns gravity. The two began pulling themselves back into the outer solar system, sparing earth.
though mars wasn’t so lucky, and that’s the reason mars is so small compared to earth. jupiter is also the reason the asteroid belt didn’t form a planet. Jupiter came too close, sped up all the asteroids, and caused them all to fragment instead of collide to form bigger objects.

so yeah, everyone says “oh thank Jupiter for defending us from asteroids!!” but you really should be thanking saturn for stopping jupiter from destroying everything in the inner solar system

kypickles space fact of the day: day 10
earth used to have two moons

when the planet theia hit earth 4 billion years ago, it completely pulverized earth and formed the moon. Well, two moons actually formed. The bigger one, our moon, and a smaller one.
Well, our moon ate the other one.
so, the reason you don’t see two moons in the sky is because our moon ate the second one.

kypickles space fact of the day: day 9
there used to be 15+ planets in the solar system

when the solar system was forming, there was enough material to create 20 rocky planets. After the suns protoplanetary disc was eaten by the planets, here are all the ones that survived, in order from closest to furthest from the sun (that we know of):
-venus
-vulcan
-earth
-theia
-mars
-borealis
-mercury
-liber
-uranus
-jupiter
-planet 9 (unnamed)
-neptune
-saturn
-uranus impactor 1
-uranus impactor 2
-jupiter impactor
and possibly many more we don’t know about

and here’s what happened to them:
vulcan hit venus and caused it to have a weird day night cycle
theia hit earth and formed the moon
borealis hit mars and formed two moons, hellas and argyre, which then hit mars again
liber hit mercury and caused it to spiral toward the sun
jupiter and saturn moved inward, causing uranus and neptune to move out
uranus was hit by two planets, giving it a weird axial tilt. Jupiter got hit by a small rocky planet at this time
as the gas giants were moving around, planet 9’s orbit was disturbed and it was ejected from the solar system entirely
and that gives us the solar system we have today

kypickle's space fact of the day: day 8
the stars are far and the speed of light is way too slow

the closest star to us is 4 light years away. That means it takes the fastest thing in existence, light, 4 years to get there. That means the light coming from that star took 4 years to get to earth, so, we see it 4 years in the past.
And that's just the closest one.
Betelgeuse, a red giant star thats predicted to explode soon, is 600 light years away. That means when you look at Betelgeuse in the night sky, you're looking at something 600 years in the past. That light you see today from Betelgeuse started travelling in the 1400s.
The thing is, Betelgeuse might've already exploded. Maybe it exploded 400 years ago.
Well, we won't know for another 200 years because of how light travels. So, there are stars in the night sky that could be long dead. You're looking at objects that are no longer there. Illusions from the past.

Kypickle's space fact of the day: day 7
So, i'm sure you've heard of jupiter's great red spot, a permanent hurricane on jupiter that's the size of earth, and has been raging for 100s of years
well, what if I told you its not permanent?
In fact, its currently shrinking. If you look at pictures of jupiter rom 1879, the quality is pretty bad, but the red spot is very clearly much bigger.
the great red spot is predicted to disappear entirely around 50 years from now. We think it formed in the 1600s, so it's lasted for almost 500 years.
And who knows, maybe another permanent hurricane will take it's place, and your great grandkids will learn about the great blue spot or the great orange spot, or even the great white spot in school, instead of the great red spot

kypickles space fact of the day: day 6

our galaxy, the milky way, has collided with several other galaxies

when the universe was forming, galaxies were popping up everywhere. In our local group of galaxies, the milky way was the first to form, and quickly started eating all the other galaxies around it. Eventually, the local group cooled down and stabilized, but the milky way had caught many galaxies in an orbit and was slowly devouring them, and this is still going on today
the milky way has dozens of satellite galaxies, that it will eventually eat.
So, the milky way has eaten other galaxies before and it will do it again. Galaxies really aren’t the calm things depicted in photos. They will devour anything that gets too close, rip it apart and eject it’s stars into distant space.
the milky way has one massive collision left in store, with the younger, but bigger, andromeda galaxy.
in 4 billion years from now, just as our sun is dying, the milky way and andromeda galaxies will collide, tearing each other to shreds and combining into a gigantic galaxy with over 2 trillion stars: Milkomeda.

kypickle’s space fact of the day: day 5
yesterday i talked about Luhman 16, the third closest system to us, so now it’s time to talk about the first

im sure some of you have heard of proxima centauri, which is the closest system to us. Some say proxima centauri is part of a bigger system, alpha centauri, and that’s the closest to us, but we actually don’t know if proxima is part of alpha, so i’ll be treating it as it’s own system.

proxima centauri is a red dwarf, which is the smallest type of star. It’s only 12% the size of the sun, and only a bit bigger than jupiter in radius (though it is still way more massive.)

there are three confirmed planets orbiting proxima centauri. We’ll go in order from the closest to farthest from the star.

Proxima Centauri D is a mars-sized planet with a year of only 7 days. That means it orbits proxima centauri every week. This makes it very hot, so it’s probably lava planet.

Proxima B is a rocky planet 1.2x bigger than earth that orbits in proxima centauris habitable zone, where temperatures allow liquid water to exist. However, this planet likely isn’t habitable, because it’s year is only 11 days, meaning it orbits very close to proxima centauri as well. This makes it tidally locked, meaning it has a permanent day side and a permanent night side, with no day and night cycle. To make it even worse, proxima centauri is extremely active, and it sometimes releases “superflares” that could destroy proxima b’s atmosphere.

Proxima C is an interesting planet, because we don’t know if it’s rocky or a gas planet. It’s 7x more massive than earth, meaning it’s either an unusually large rocky planet or an unusually small gas giant. Proxima C also most likely has rings like Saturn. It takes about 2,000 days (about 5 years) to orbit proxima centauri, making it much further out than D and B. It’s proxima centari’s equivalent of neptune, an extremely distant planet and cold planet.

This relates to my day 2 space fact post about planet Janssen, aka 55 Cancri E
Here's Janssen (not a real image, just an artists concept) compared to earth and mars
this thing is massive

kypickles space fact of the day: day 4
today we’re gonna visit the third-closest solar system to earth

its called luhman 16, and it’s only 6-7 light years away. This makes it the third-closest system to us, right after Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star.

the cool part is, the system has no stars. Instead it has two brown dwarfs, which are failed stars that didn’t gain enough mass to become stars, making them more like gigantic planets that glow red hot.

we also have direct images of luhman 16, and we know what their clouds look like. One of them has bands of gas, like jupiter, and the other has no bands and looks more irregular, wit random bright and dark spots.

there was a potential planet discovered in 2013 in the system, but unfortunately, that option was ruled out. however, this doesn’t mean there are no planets in the system, it just means there isn’t a gas giant with an orbit of two years or less.

kypickle’s space fact of the day: day 3

our solar system is currently inside a nebula

well, it’s technically a nebula, but it’s not one of those really impressive ones you see from hubble and james webb. It’s called the Local Interstellar Cloud, and we’re right in the middle of it. It’s just a featureless blob that has slightly more gas than the surrounding space.

its also really big. All the nearest stars and systems to us are in it. Alpha Centauri, Luhman 16, etc. the cloud is 30 light-years across, meaning it takes the speed of light 30 yeas to get from one side to the other.

Unfortunately, we’re also drifting out of it. the sun actually entered the cloud 10,000 years ago and we’re only going to stay in it for another 1,900 before we leave.