Solar System?
Surely no one has ever told you these 5 things!
There have been a lot of videos circulating on the Web for a long time, proposing oddities
and mysteries of our solar system, but then in reality all they do is repeat over and
over again the same old things, which have nothing mysterious or strange about them at
all.
Here we propose instead a few that you are very unlikely to have heard before.
Let us know what you think...
5)Between Earth and the Moon is there room for all the planets?
Impressive, but true.
To think about it seems like a really strange thing... and even after doing and redoing
the calculations you still almost can't believe it...
You know the planets in the solar system, right?
In our imagination, they are huge objects, especially the gas giants, and we tend to
consider them the archetype of everything in the solar system which is disproportionate
when compared with the size of our everyday context...
Well, now on the other side of the scale let us instead put our idea of the Earth-Moon
distance...
Is it true or not that we perceive it almost as a walk in the backyard?
Nothing, compared to other distances...
And so never, ever would you believe someone who told you that if we put all the planets
next to each other, all seven would fit comfortably in the space that separates us from the Moon
-wouldn't they?
Instead.
Try adding up their equatorial diameters: Mercury 4879 km, Venus 12104 km, Mars 6792
km, Jupiter 142,984 km, Saturn 120,536 km, Uranus 51,118 km, Neptune 49,528 km...
What is the total?
It should be 387,941 km - right?
Now... we know that the average distance between the Moon and Earth is 384,400 km, the minimum
is 356,600 km and the maximum is 406,700 km.
And so here is proof that all seven planets can fit comfortably in this little corner
of the universe that is cislunar space.
Leaning against each other, like old bottles on a shelf - while we thought of them as giant
white whales in the great ocean of the solar system...
4) What would happen to the Earth if its orbital velocity suddenly went to zero?
One question we usually ask, and which many people take for granted, is why the planet
Earth or the other planets do not crash into the Sun.
The answer lies in Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravity.
Remember the story of the apple falling from the tree?
The apple is attracted to the Earth, and once detached from the branch, the apple falls
with an accelerated motion toward the surface... but the Moon is also attracted to the Earth,
and yet...
it does not fall!
How come?
For one simple reason: the Moon, unlike the apple, compensates for centripetal gravitational
attraction by traveling through an orbit with a speed that allows it to develop a centrifugal
force of the opposite sign.
And the concept can be extended to the Sun and the planets that gravitate around it.
The magnitude of the attraction is the same, but the effect it generates on the body is
proportional to the mass of the two bodies.
If the Sun were to magically disappear, all the planets would go off on a tangent and
leave their orbits retaining the velocity they had at the time of detachment.
The Earth, to say, would go the way of the Moon in “Space: 1999” - drifting into
the solar system.
But what if, instead, it was the orbital velocity, i.e., the centrifugal force that would suddenly
zero out?
Well, here the thing-assuming such a thing were possible-would get even less funny.
Our planet, in fact, would begin to plummet toward the Sun... slowly at first, and then
at an ever-increasing speed!
The question at this point can only be...how long would it take the Earth to fall to the
Sun?
Is there a formula that can tell us?
The formula exists, albeit in approximate form, and it is very simple:
Time of fall = Period of revolution/5.66 And it tells us that the Earth would fall
headlong into the Sun in about 0.01767 years, or 64.5 days, coming to strike the photosphere
at a speed of 616 km per second!
The same formula obviously applies to all the other planets in the solar system, so
it will be easy to calculate, for example, that Jupiter's fall would take 766 days (more
than two years!) and Neptune even 29 years!
3)Mars volcanoes in Egypt?
Who has never heard of the famous correlation between the pyramids of Giza and the stars
of Orion's Belt?
In the early 1990s, the hypothesis put forward by Belgian Robert Bauval in his book "The
Orion Mystery" became a topic of conversation even among people usually far removed from
any form of scientific speculation; probably the accomplice was the fascination exerted
by the combination of two disciplines such as astronomy and Egyptology, often perceived
as mysterious and "esoteric."
What we now propose for your attention is the existence at Giza of an even more impressive
correlation, and one that no one at the time had yet highlighted.
In the imagination of a large number of people a strong figurative equivalence between ancient
Egypt and the planet Mars has been created for some time; a mental short-circuit that
probably originated in the summer of 1976 when the Viking 1 spacecraft, recently in
orbit around the red planet, sent back to Earth spectacular pictures of Cydonia, a hilly
region located in the mid-latitudes north of the planet.
One of these photos, which immediately went around the world, depicted the famous "Martian
sphinx," a relief a couple of kilometers long that Viking's low photographic resolution
helped to show as a humanoid face facing the sky, moreover surrounded by what at first
glance appeared to be large pyramid-shaped constructions.
Years later, in 1998, other and more advanced probes would show that this was not a huge
sculpture, but an ordinary mound to which erosion had given, seen from above, the coarse
appearance of a face; and that even the pyramids were but natural geological formations.
But by then the damage was done, and long ago the fanciful hypothesis had begun to circulate
that a remote civilization had colonized Mars and then migrated to ancient Egypt.
Exactly as depicted in the 1996 movie Stargate, which was another milestone in the collective
identification process between Egyptian and Martian sands.
And it is precisely considering the existence of this pseudoscientific movement in favor
of the common origin of Martians and ancient Egyptians that we have always marveled at
the fact that practically none of their members has ever paid attention to something much
more obvious in "favor" of their theses.
We refer to the extraordinary similarity of the arrangement of the three pyramids of Giza
with that of the celebrated volcanoes of the Martian region of Tharsis.
You got it right, we are really talking about the group of four volcanoes dominated by the
immense mass of Olympus Mons!
Have we gone mad?
Well, before you jump to easy conclusions take a look at the photos we offer.
The one on the left shows the plain of Giza, with the three pyramids, while on the right
a map of the region of the four volcanoes is shown for comparison.
Obviously the scale changes, but the alignment and orientation (contrary to the comparison
with Orion's Belt, which is tilted to the meridian by a very different angle) are virtually
identical!
And that's not all... compared to the correlation with Orion, in fact, there is also something
more, namely the perfect (and eerie) identification of Olympus Mons with Gebel el-Qibli, the imposing
rocky outcrop that - uniquely - rises over the Giza plain to a height of 60 meters.
Take a look at the photos, isn't it cringe-worthy?
Who in the face of such an amazing concordance of elements would not be ready to consider
the possibility that the ancient Egyptians really did come from Mars?
Obviously only for a moment, given the number of objections that (rightly!) would immediately
be raised.
And indeed, if a moral can be drawn from it, we would say that such coincidences should
teach us to use sparingly our ability to find relationships even between things far apart
in space and time.
And to put it bluntly, this magnificent and random correlation somewhat downplays even
the one with the stars in Orion's Belt, which loses some of its uniqueness.
Don't you find it?
2) Sun and Moon with the same apparent diameter.
Randomness or necessity?
One thing that has always impressed us about our solar system is that the apparent diameters
of the Sun and Moon appear virtually identical.
This strange concordance of angular dimensions, as we know, gives rise to solar eclipses,
one of the rarest and most exciting astronomical phenomena offered by our sky.
And in the face of these two "miracles," it is no wonder that for long centuries this
was regarded by religious thought as one of the proofs of God's will to give the world
two identical sources of light, one for the day and one for the night...
Today, most astronomers believe that it is just an interesting coincidence that the Moon
manages to overlap almost perfectly with the Sun since there is really no physical reason
why it should be so.
Simply, the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, but the Sun is also about 400
times farther from the Earth than the Moon.
Such simple geometry tells us that the Moon's apparent disk is almost exactly the size of
the Sun's apparent disk.
But, beware of that "almost exactly" ... the distances between the Earth, Moon, and Sun
are in fact subject to small variations due to the eccentricity of the orbits.
So, observed from Earth's surface, the angular diameter of the Sun varies between 31.6 and
32.7 arcminutes, while that of the Moon varies between 29.6 and 33.5 arcminutes.
As can be seen, the correspondence is not exactly perfect, which is why total solar
eclipses occur only at certain times.
But if it is all coincidence, would it be possible to calculate what are the odds that
our Earth is the only one in the solar system that has a moon capable of rightly hiding
the solar disk?
Well, granted that the Sun is that size, someone has estimated that the odds of Earth's only
natural satellite being large enough to cover it and experience the same eclipses are on
the order of 1/200.
Not a lot, but not a few either!
However, some say that the size of the Moon is not entirely random, but that it is somehow
related to the very existence of our species...
Motivating the claim with the hypothetical impossibility of a planet without a Moon or
with a Moon too small to benefit from tides capable of initiating the chain of life according
to the "tide pools" theory.
On the other hand, had it been much larger than it is, the Moon would have disrupted
the Earth's surface with kilometer-high tides, which would have had the opposite effect...
So, according to a scheme that goes back to the "anthropic principle" and "intelligent
design," since we exist, the Moon could not have been much different from what it is!
However, there is also to consider that on longer time scales the Earth-Moon system is
not static.
Every year the Moon's orbit grows by about 3.8 centimeters and our day lengthens by about
0.000015 seconds.
At this rate, in about 50 million years the Moon will never completely eclipse the Sun,
and will only produce increasingly narrower annular eclipses.
This orbital evolution also implies that total solar eclipses in the distant past would have
been much more frequent and long-lasting.
1) Double pair in the Solar System
Curious facts about the Solar System are sometimes so elusive that they remain hidden even after
centuries of study and observation.
There is one, in particular, seemingly so trivial and transparent that it has escaped
everyone's notice, so much so that it was pointed out only a few years ago by Dennis
Rawlins, an astronomy historian known as a quirky and utterly unconventional character
Rawlins was in fact the first to notice that there are two pairs of planets in the solar
system that share several common characteristics: The Venus-Earth pair and the Uranus-Neptune
pair.
Remarkably, for both pairs, each of the following statements is true:
Each pair consists of two contiguous planets.
Each pair consists of two planets almost identical in size and mass.
Their position is central in the group of inner, rocky planets and in the group of outer,
gaseous planets.
And as a result, the pairs are symmetrically located with respect to Jupiter.
The inner members of each pair (Venus and Uranus) are the only ones of the 8 planets
to rotate retrograde.
Rawlins believes that this oddity may hide a deep cosmogonic significance, related to
some unknown mechanism of planetary formation.
But to know more we will have to wait until we have a much more complete case study of
planetary systems surrounding other stars!
There, that's all for now!
Hoping to have brought you some unusual and interesting things, we look forward to a possible
second episode!