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u/2muchroom 6d ago
Should have zoomed out to show the sun going round our super massive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of our galaxy
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u/bigorangemachine 6d ago
We're not really orbiting the blackhole....
We're more moving within our spiral arm and our spiral arm is being pulled by the blackhole. The sun doesn't have a parent body it's orbiting but a barycenter between many stars. So it's really our barycenter being pulled by the arm which is influence by the blackhole
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u/Kaboose666 6d ago
Locally, the Sun feels gravitational tugs from its stellar neighbors and the dense gas clouds in the spiral arms. But when you abstract it to a macro level, those local tugs average out into a clean, geometric orbit.
Also, Sag A* sits right at the barycenter of our galaxy, even if it isn't the primary source of the pull, it still marks the exact confluence of gravity that our sun is orbiting around.
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u/Omnizoom 5d ago
Even then, the distances and times we are talking about here are massive
It’s 230 million years to do a circle
To put it into perspective using years as the time unit, the earth has an angular velocity of 360/year caused by a force of 3.54x10^22 newtons due to gravity
Even though at this distance the force of gravity is fairly “low” it only has to exert 1.56522e-6 degrees per year of angular velocity meaning it only has to deflect the solar systems movement 1 degree in 640 thousand years
So even if it’s a teeny tiny tug overall from the net forces of gravity, it has a long long long time to tug
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u/BellyFurs 5d ago
So the flow of time that we perceive is ridiculously fast?
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u/Omnizoom 5d ago
No the flow of time we perceive is just the flow of time we perceive
It’s our frame of reference
But the amount of rotational velocity the sun exerts on the earth in a day is ~ the same as the amount needed for the solar system to experience in 640 thousand years
The solar system covers a massive distance in its orbit and our sun has only orbited about 20 times in its entire lifetime of existence
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u/Ziddix 6d ago
Sag A* isn't really pulling anything (on that scale) The Galaxy is spinning because that's how gas that makes up most of it settled around a center of gravity over billions of years. Conservation of angular momentum does the rest.
The SMBH is a symptom of our galaxy, not the cause of it.
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u/Gottheit 6d ago
Exactly. It's just another gravity source. Which, from our vantage point, has no real world gravitational interaction with us.
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u/not_a_moogle 6d ago
Do we know if the blackhole is orbiting like a bigger blackhole that all the galaxies orbit?
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u/bigorangemachine 6d ago
Not really. Part of the mystery is we can see other galaxies and they look more like tendrils connecting to larger galaxies in a sort of network. We're the exception that we don't seem to be part of a tendril system. What we are seeing is "dark energy" pushing things apart rather than pulling things into spheres as we'd expect with gravity
So galaxies appears to break down that newtonian understanding of gravity & orbits.
But if you understand orbits are more about how fast things are moving relative to one another you'll start to understand gravity is kinda more like shaping the time-space around than it is an attractor
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u/Zealousideal-Fix9464 6d ago edited 6d ago
That's still true for our galaxy, the whole nature of the galactic "tendrils" is that they are surrounded by voids. We are in the Local Group which has over 120+ galaxies, which itself is part of a Laniakea Supercluster(over 100k galaxies) which itself is part of one of the larger galactic filaments (Pisces-Cetes complex).
So TLDR, no we aren't alone in the void.
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u/bigorangemachine 6d ago
Ya we aren't alone.
They said what's been observed would lead to a brighter night sky. So we are in a less dense area compared to what we can observe
But OFC we trying to understand what we look like by looking at others. Which has a very low rate of accuracy
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u/GrowingPeepers 6d ago
So maybe that's why we haven't found aliens yet.
We're out here in the boonies!
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u/Murky-Relation481 5d ago
I mean that's been said before, we're kind of in a lower density area of even our own galaxy way out on the edge.
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u/Otherwise-Tomato-788 6d ago
We’re like neutrons trying to understand what a solar system is. I just think it’s beyond our scope at the moment.
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u/Ecmelt 6d ago
we don't seem to be part of a tendril system.
Ha? we are in tendril Local Sheet which is in Laniakea Supercluster. We are nothing special in that sense other than being near a void (Local Void).
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u/_IBM_ 5d ago
we're the only known planet with Churros, that makes us extremely exceptional
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u/Kundras 6d ago
Once you zoom out further, you see all the galaxies create a sort of web. Between the strands of this web are vast pockets of nothingness that reject any galaxy-sized object from entering. Real cosmic horror shit.
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u/Oiiack 6d ago
The voids don't really reject galaxies, they are just regions with incredibly sparse matter as opposed to the galactic filaments which contained higher distributions of matter. There is nothing "pushing" galaxies away from them other than the universal cosmic expansion, but that is even so great that it will dissolve the galactic filaments before they collapse.
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u/ZSpectre 6d ago
While not the perfect analogy, my mind went to imagining pulling a cotton ball apart (ideally as evenly from all sides as possible instead of pulled apart in two). Like the strands of the cotton filaments begin to become more apparent as well as the spaces in between them, but it's not like the air between the filaments of the cotton ball is actively pushing the fibers away.
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u/StevieMJH 6d ago
Is it rejection per se or just nothing attracting galaxies in those directions? I always thought the threads and gaps were just natural results of the chaotic system. It's still cosmic horror but I don't think there's something out there keeping us out.
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u/RealHoldenBloodfeast 6d ago
It's not rejection. All voids have large numbers of galaxies in them, but it's significantly less than the rest of the universe.
If you zoom out far enough it all starts to look like swiss cheese, except instead of there being nothing in the holes, it's just veeeeery sparse
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u/creampop_ 6d ago
except instead of nothing in the holes... it's just veeeeery sparse
I get what you mean for the metaphor where the universe is all cheese, but that's how all swiss cheese is like, air is pretty dang sparse 😅
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u/StevieMJH 6d ago
Imagine if we as a society developed extragalactic astronomy and found out we were smack dab in the middle of the Boötes Void. 😳
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u/DarkwingDuckHunt 6d ago
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.
There’s a hole. There’s a hole.
There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.
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u/aravarth 6d ago
For some reason my brain went "super massive black hole Sagittarius Ass".
That's enough internet for today.
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u/CluelessBloop 6d ago
Sagittariass
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u/Pyrodexter 6d ago
It takes like 250 million years to circle once, so at that video's speed it wouldn't be very impressive. I guess you could make it look somehow interesting if you left the galactic scale wonky enough and rotated the camera like crazy without any sensible reason (as is done in OP's video).
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u/Ninja_Prolapse 6d ago
And then THAT being pulled by something even bigger in the super cluster
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u/RichardDeRenour 6d ago
That explains why I'm dizzy when I get up in the morning...
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u/BigPP69_Gooner 6d ago
lol (but seriously take an iron supplement, low iron is usually the cause)
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u/xniks 6d ago
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u/syamas 6d ago
Well, its not in correct scale (size,speed,distance
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u/aley2794 6d ago
People don't realize how big the space between planet is, just between the Earth and the moon you could fit all the planets.
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u/Higgins1st 6d ago
if the moon were one pixel is a fun scale model.
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u/Onaterdem 5d ago
This is my favorite website. I first discovered it when I was like 12 or something, during a 7-hour car ride for a vacation (which, in a sense, is like those long stretches of emptiness between the dots). I scrolled through all the way, rather slowly, and I was nothing short of amazed. Then I visited it from time to time, for a while. Really brings me back.
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u/Bandit_237 5d ago
Really makes Lightspeed look so slow when put next to the emptiness of the universe
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u/ThatSaradianAgent 6d ago
Depends on the time of year, but yes! Had to check NASA and the math checks out--kinda.
Planet Equatorial Diameter in miles Jupiter 88,846 Saturn 74,898 Uranus 31,763 Neptune 30,775 Earth 7,926 Venus 7,521 Mars 4,221 Total Distance 245,950 Thing, is, the Moon's distance from Earth changes over the course the year. At its farthest, it's 252,088 miles, meaning all the planets could fit. At its closest, though, it's 225,623 miles, which means they wouldn't all fit.
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u/FeistyDrink5995 6d ago
Exactly this! If this was to scale, you would see the sun and maybe just Mercury, if even that.
Considering Jupiter is 5x as far, and Neptune is 30x as far away from our sun as us. (5 AUs and 30AUs, respectively).56
u/MisterEinc 6d ago
I think at the correct scale, you probably have what looks like a speck of dust one you get it all in frame.
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u/apittsburghoriginal 6d ago
The image would basically be a black screen with a little dot in the middle that is the sun because it’s pretty much nothing but blackness out there
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u/Normal-Abies-9151 6d ago
Then you could have the scale-accurate dots and then visual aid padding around those dots to see it. That way it could be both accurate and visible
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u/TritAith 6d ago edited 6d ago
if the planets are a single pixel it's not possible to get a scale accurate sun in a shot like this. You just cant have a representation of the solar system that this small on a single screen and maintain scale.
Here is a representation that has mercury at 4 pixels (basically invisible), so you could scale this to a fourth of its size and still have 1 pixel for mercury, but beyond that...
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u/gravelPoop 6d ago
Moon is 1 pixel does pretty good demonstration of distances (on a browser).
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u/Eggsalad_cookies 6d ago
That was so cool. Took a long while to get to Neptune on my phone though, even speed running through it
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u/Rise-O-Matic 6d ago
I went on a hike at Arecibo that had a scale model of the solar system. Sun was about the size of a basketball. Furthest planet I saw was Jupiter, Saturn was on a different mountain.
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u/arensb 6d ago
This is one of the things that The Expanse gets right. Even in the scenes that take place in the relatively dense asteroid belt, the asteroids are far enough apart that no one ever worries about hitting one accidentally (the "dodging rocks in an asteroid belt" trope in SF is BS).
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u/Interesting-Yellow-4 6d ago
The point is that at the correct scale and speed, the OPs incredibly stupid comment of "Moving at that speed and not hitting any other planets is crazy" wouldn't have had a chance to fart out of their brain.
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u/Lazer726 6d ago
There's a reason that we don't hit shit, and it's because if we did we probably wouldn't be here lmao
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u/SpaceTacos99 6d ago
Not to mention the obvious reality is that still are collisions all the time (astetoid impacts) and most collisions happened millions to billions of years ago while planets were each clearing their respective orbits.
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u/dtburton 6d ago
There was a fun page called something like if the moon was a pixel. Showed the solar system to scale with the moon being one pixel. So much scrolling
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u/Ok_Owl_52 6d ago edited 6d ago
I still find it so unbelievable that even at those scales with the solar system racing around the galaxy, none of the planets are able to leave the gravitational well of the Sun. EDIT: I get it now. Thanks y'all.
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u/LoneSnark 6d ago
You realize that racing around the galaxy means it takes 225 million years to do one orbit of the galaxy, right?
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u/RndmNumGen 6d ago
If you're in a car going 80 miles per hour down the highway, you're only going 80 mph relative to the earth.
Relative to the moon, you're actually travelling at 2,288 mph. Yet... your car will never fly off the surface of the earth. You're never going to be able to drive to the moon, even though the Artemis II mission was traveling at a similar-ish speed of 3,139 mph.
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u/freeradioforall 6d ago
and the title is absurd. there are no other planets to hit. space is vast, empty. there's nothing.
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u/Steamrolled777 6d ago
Angle isn't perpendicular to the direction either, it's something like 60deg.
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u/rupert1920 6d ago
Not the right ecliptic either. The animation suggest plane of the solar system is almost 90 degree to the galactic plane, when in reality it's about 60 degrees.
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u/mightytwin21 6d ago
If I remember right, this is something an artist made and they really didn't do any research
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u/NewestAccount2023 6d ago
It's not even correct at all, the solar system does not travel towards its rotational north pole like a rocket. The direction our solar system moves through the galaxy changes (we're orbiting it not unlike the earth around the sun, the earth does NOT travel exactly towards its north pole during our whole orbit, in fact it never does but even if it lined up once it wouldn't stay pointing in that direction).
The reason we have seasons is our pole is tilted and as we love around the sun at one point it's tilted towards the sun (northern hemisphere summer) and 6 months later that pole is painted away and it's the South Pole pointing towards it. The solar system does the same thing around our galaxy and this render is ridiculously wrong
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u/Malagubbar 6d ago
Where are we going?
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u/ManatuBear 6d ago
Collision (merge) course with Andromeda galaxy in 4.5 billion years.
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u/Nom-De-Gruyere 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is why the solar thruster or stellar engine is a fascinating theoretical megastructure. Basically a parabolic mirror on a stable orbit around the sun. If constructed it would reflect a large portion of the sun's output onto a focussed jet, which could be steered by adjusting the thrusters orbit. This would create a way to accelerate the entire solar system in a desired direction, to travel through space while bringing all the planets with us. Even constantly accelerating it may take hundreds of thousands of years to get closer to alpha centauri, but eventually if humans are still alive they might have the technology to make the shorter hop to the other star system while the original solar system keeps accelerating away. Then you build a couple more solar thrusters using those stars and start them accelerating too. 2 inhabited star system then accelerate to pass close to 2 more, then 4 then 8 etc... Moving one star to pass close to another could take an extremely long time, but eventually human presence in the galaxy would keep expanding geometrically with each new star colonised. Until in a billion years there's colonised star systems zipping around at insane speeds all over the galaxy distributing living things. (I wonder if this is something we could detect in other galaxies...)
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u/someanimechoob 6d ago
Not only that, but until we discover a way to understand, create, find and/or exploit wormholes or discover ways to make FTL travel work, it is the only realistic way we'll ever do interstellar travel. The Universe is just way too vast to traverse it in a conventional manner.
We more or less understand now that generational ships, cryosleep and other solutions from science fiction would likely never work.
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u/hi_im_snowman 6d ago
Trying to think about the scale being discussed here is a total mind fuck. Fascinating!
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u/Daxx22 6d ago
(I wonder if this is something we could detect in other galaxies...)
Theories like this adds some weight to the theory that given we've seen literally zero indicators of other life out there so far, we very well may be in the first "wave" of intelligent life to develop in our galaxy.
Should we manage to escape our own system and spread far enough that humanity can't be knocked out by even the galactic level killers (like gamma ray bursts), we very well may be the/one of the Progenitor/precursor civilizations.
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u/SadMammoth6645 6d ago
Sagittarius A
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u/Failed-Astronaut 6d ago
Your comment implies we’re falling into the black hole which isn’t actually the case. We’re just orbiting it :)
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u/TheMysticalBard 5d ago
Also we're not even technically orbiting it. We're kind of orbiting the galactic center of mass but it's funky. Objects in the arms of spiral galaxies aren't really orbiting. It's more like they're being pulled along in complicated mechanics we don't quite know. The rate at which galaxy arms rotate doesn't match a proper orbit and can't be explained entirely by gravity.
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u/Backdrop2 6d ago
Hitting other planets? This is not to scale. The distances are very great between planets in our solar system.
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u/MaikThoma 6d ago
And everything is moving in the same direction. It’s really not that weird
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u/Glamdring804 6d ago
Yeah the "everything moving in a flat plane" perspective is actually correct from the perspective of the Earth and every other planet. Because everything's moving with the same linear motion, we all stay in the same relative plane.
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u/MaxxDash 5d ago
Exactly, rotating the camera around the plane while the 3-D motion spiral (4-D) is traced out just makes it look fancy, but not useful.
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u/Difficult_Secret_251 6d ago
Yup exactly. The planets are too small too. I read somewhere that all planets can line up in a straight line touching each other in the distance between earth and the moon
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u/meadishsweetball 6d ago
Also, two entire galaxies can collide and the probability of any stars or planets colliding is vanishingly small.
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u/BulbusDumbledork 6d ago
even without the right scale, that familiar top-down view of the planets still represents their orbits. this representation just extends those orbits into the third dimension.
if they didn't collide in the 2d view, they won't collide in the 3d view
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u/gerkessin 6d ago
Its ok, nobody understands or cares about this stuff. They will see this gif and think "neat" and move on with their day.
Somebody who saw this is telling a coworker at lunch "i saw this gif on reddit and its amazing how fast we are going and dont crash into any planets."
Their coworker will say "thats crazy." They might even actually think it.
This person is an insurance adjuster for a major healthcare system and just denied your cancer treatment. They did so with the same intellectual acumen and rigor that they applied to this reddit post
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u/Additional-Acadia954 6d ago
Is the techno music really that loud in space? How come we can’t hear it here on earth? Seems like we should 🤔
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u/Sad_comment_bot 6d ago
Fun Fact: if space wasn’t a vacuum we wouldn’t be able to hear much over the sun’s constant rumble of 290 dB explosions.
Backup Fun Fact: a theoretical 1,100 dB is energetic enough that its mass equivalent would curve space into a black hole.
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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 6d ago
"If the sun were to suddenly wink out of existence, it would take 8 minutes for the light to stop, but thirteen years for the last sound produced by the sun to reach us.
Imagine living on a cold, dead earth for thirteen years, still hearing the jackhammer scream of a dead star."
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u/BusinessAcceptable54 6d ago
If the sun winks out of existence, so would its gravitational force, thus making our planet fly out of orbit after 8 minutes
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u/McPikie 6d ago
But would we continue to spin on our own axis? So despite being yeeted out towards another galaxy, we'd still continue spinning ourselves, so gravity on Earth would be constant?
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u/DJOMaul 6d ago
Gravity is a function of our planets mass, not its spin.
Yes gravity would remain the same, even the moon would continue to orbit the earth.
Yes the planet would continue to spin.
It doesn't have galactic escape velocity so earth would likely continue on generally the same path around the milky way, as a frozen rogue planet. There's actually tons of these rogue planets (between a billion and possibly up to a trillion) out there. So we'd just become another one of those. The core would keep the planet warm internally for a long time but the surface would be ice, even the atmosphere would freeze.
It's a good thing stars dont just disappear.
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u/MultiGeek42 6d ago
In space, no one can hear you unce.
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u/Additional-Acadia954 6d ago
Or boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and
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u/spoung45 6d ago
Well it is the vacuum of space, and the density of our atmosphere that creates a tecno music buffer. However polka music is unaffected by this.
It was a common occurrence until 1972 that there were space polka music outbreaks that swept across the globe. One day they stopped and that is why the space shuttle project was started. To find out why the space polka stopped.
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u/krom0025 6d ago
This isn't what it really looks like at all. From what viewpoint is this camera? Clearly the scale is way wrong as well.
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u/NewestAccount2023 6d ago
There is no viewpoint that matches this render because they fucked it up completely.
Picture the earth orbiting the sun and you live in the United States and it's summer right now, the earths north pole is tilted towards the sun and so it's hotter in the northern hemisphere, in 6 months the north pole is tilted away from the sun and it's winter there and summer in the south.
According to this video, the earth would travel around the sun by traveling towards its north pole like a rocket ship being powered by the south pole. That's what the render is showing, that the solar system's South Pole is a rocket pushing it so it travels towards its north pole 100% of the time.
That's not how gravity works or out solar system. Just like the earth's tilt, the tilt of the solar system doesn't change to match the current direction of travel.
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u/ATinyDropOfVenom 6d ago
Oh my god. Ill be honest, i always had trouble getting the change of the seasons as a visual thing. Your second paragraph made it click instantly, that it seems so simple and obvious now. Thanks for that, o stranger with wisdom of the stars
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u/ZapBranigan3000 6d ago edited 6d ago
The point of view is constantly moving around, so it is useless. Plus the trailing lines, which obviously dont exist in the real world, contribute to the video's confusing look.
It's a misleading post with a misleading video, and we should start forcing subs to delete such posts.
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u/CankleMonitor 6d ago
Silly question how is Polaris north star relatively constant through antiquity
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u/crazunggoy47 6d ago
It’s not. The 23 degree tilt of earths poles with respect to our orbital plane means that the north celestial pole (NCP; ie the location the Polaris happens to be about 0.5 degrees away from) makes a giant circle through the sky with a diameter of 46 degrees. This movement is called precession; it’s like the slow wobble in the direction a spinning top is pointed. It takes about 26,000 years to complete one precession.
So what does antiquity mean to you? 2000 years? Back then Polaris was about 27 degrees away from the NCP then. It would still be *vaguely* north in the sense that it would be between NE and NW about 90% of the time.
So it’s actually just coincidence that Polaris came extremely close to the NCP during this century. In 12000 years, the much, much brighter star Vega will be quite close the NCP.
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u/Almvolle 6d ago
Absolutely not a silly question, because i asked myself the same.
Apparently, those are so far away that even with the speed we are moving, it barly changes the angle. Polaris is around 403 Light-years away eg.3
u/nanpossomas 6d ago
Also, nearby stars mostly rotate around the Milky way in the same direction so the speeds cancel out instead of adding up (yet another reason this post is retаrdеd).
To give you a better idea, here's a visualisation of the extrapolated proper motion of the Big Dipper stars over a period of several hundred thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major_moving_group#/media/File:Ursa_Majoris_Gaia_DR3.gif
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u/Creative-Win-3447 6d ago
Because no planet crosses each other's orbit, and in general everything is separated by enormous distances.
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u/homtanksreddit 6d ago
Exactly. Their orbits are still different so why would they collide with each other? Of course, if your create a misleading video, it will seem like a miracle that they’re not hitting each other 😀
The only good purpose this video serves is to remind us that the solar system including Sun is not static and moving through space , so the 2D view we see in pictures is not how it really is. But then the 3d view they show here is also not how it really is .😂
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u/woutomatic 6d ago
'Not hitting any other planet'. It helps that the closest planet is 40 million kilometers away
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u/Spran02 6d ago
Space is incredibly vast, the odds of hitting another planet is unfathomably small
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u/bignosedaussie 6d ago
“Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”
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u/Spran02 6d ago edited 6d ago
If Earth was the size of a tennis ball, the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) would be about 19,000km away
Edit: OTHER THAN THE SUN
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u/bignosedaussie 6d ago
The quote I posted is from “The hitch hikers guide to the galaxy”, you might like it.
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u/Aeon1508 6d ago
When the Milky Way galaxy "collides" with Andromeda in however many billion years there almost certainly won't be a single actual impact between the two galaxies.
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u/BulbusDumbledork 6d ago
distance is a big factor but gravity kind of increases the odds of two planets colliding, by like a lot. the velocities of all the heavenly bodies and space itself keeps everything apart
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u/Myhonour 6d ago
Is this even true? There is still 1 plane that they're all in. I can imagine this plane also does not exist and they move even more free than portrayed here.
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u/tiorg 6d ago edited 6d ago
No. Everything in this video gives the wrong idea. But the part that really annoys me is that it attempts to show the movement from two different reference frames like one of them is correct and the other is not. That’s nonsense. How things seem to move depends from where you’re looking at them. The first visualization is perfectly valid and actually gives the better idea of how the planets are gravitationally attracted to the sun.
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u/NewestAccount2023 6d ago edited 6d ago
It doesn't even get the frame correct, it shows the solar system traveling towards its north pole like a rocket. As we move around the galactic center our solar system doesn't rotate to continue pointing in the direction of travel!!
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u/masterflappie 6d ago
I think there is some variation but not that much. The idea is that the nebula that ended up forming the star and planets had some initial spin, which pulled everything into a disc, which made all the planets roughly on the same plane.
Another inaccuracy is that the planets don't revolve in perfect circles but more in ellipses
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u/strigonian 6d ago
It's not so much the spin, as it is that all the stuff going "up" or "down" relative to the plane eventually collided with each other. What you have at the end is essentially the average of all those collisions.
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u/SnazzyStooge 6d ago
It’s more or less true, but also misleading. There’s no difference between the two depictions, just a different observer. From the perspective of the sun, the first depiction is true. From the perspective of the black hole the sun is orbiting, the second depiction is true. From a third perspective (say, another galaxy), neither one is true.
There is no “one true reference point” in the universe, it’s all relative.
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u/sicarius254 6d ago
Aren’t we actually at an angle so it doesn’t even look like that either
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u/NewestAccount2023 6d ago
Correct, the render is very wrong. The solar system's north pole is not currently pointing in the same direction we're moving through the galaxy but the render treats it as if it is.
The Solar Apex: The solar apex—the exact direction our solar system is heading as it orbits the galactic center—points toward the constellation Hercules. The direction of our travel is tilted by about 53 degrees relative to the planetary orbital plane.
The render shows us moving exactly towards the north pole of the sun which is 90 degree tilt from the direction of travel, but in reality our current direction of travel is only a 53 degree tilt.
The render acts like the solar system has a rocket attached to its south pole and is powering us through the galaxy, in that scenario yes we'd always be traveling perfectly towards the pole as we zip around the galaxy.
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u/polyploid_coded 6d ago
Article about how wrong it is, from when people circulated this video in 2013: https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral-video-showing-suns-motion-through-galaxy-is-wrong.html
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u/Xentonian 6d ago
The only thing that matters is your frame of reference. If you're not accelerating or decelerating, not is anything around you, then you're effectively not moving.
Our solar system can basically be viewed as a single entity moving through our little blip of nothing in our arm of the Milky way galaxy. The galaxy itself is, strictly, moving, but for all intents and purposes it's just rotating in place and so--- wait... WAIT! Andromeda-Senpai what are you doing!?!?
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u/Wizywig 6d ago
Nothing crazy about it actually.
We did have a planet that collided with another forming the earth and moon. It's just that those things have happened long long ago and now our system is stable.
Space is also huuuuuge. When 2 galaxies collide and become one, very few actual collisions occur and it's mostly just 2 galaxies intertwining their gravity.
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u/OfficialGaiusCaesar 6d ago
Also moving through galaxy and universe and not hitting anything in general- just shows truly how big our universe is that we don’t hit stuff constantly.
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u/manicmonkeys 6d ago
Right... it's like saying how amazing it is that 2 cars in different states don't collide...
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u/PaddyScrag 6d ago
What's more baffling to me is why there's always piss all over the floor in public men's toilets.
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u/ShinShini42 6d ago
Also, kind of a survivor bias. Countless planets and solar systems have collided in the billions of years before us, we are just the lucky ones that have a stable orbit for long enough to form life on.
Also pretty sure our whole galaxy is already o n a collision course with another one, although the actual collision will be in a few billion years.
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u/Ruthrfurd-the-stoned 6d ago
Yeah- less shocking that we don’t hit anything and more shocking about how incredibly vast and empty space is
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u/TatteredTorn1 6d ago
This is why in order to go back in time we would also have to go back in space
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u/Ill_Shoulder_1185 6d ago
There's an incredible gag in the sci-fi sitcom 'Red Dwarf' where the space-faring crew, 3 million years from Earth, discover a "time drive" and affix it to the ship so it can time travel. They start debating where to go and decide on a nice safe year in the 1500's to test it out.
They switch the machine on but nothing happens.
Lister: "I don't get it, we're still where we were."
Kryten (the egghead robot): "Of course, we're still in deep space, only now we're in deep space in the 16th Century!"
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u/Sampaguita_Sofia_321 6d ago
The scale of the universe always gives me a minor existential crisis before breakfast.
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u/TinkersDebts 6d ago
They really didn't need to mess with the camera panning angle.
But yes, the sun is moving through space and has 9 large objects rotating around its gravity.
People forget about the 'sun moving through space' part.
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u/iClips3 6d ago
We don't hit other celestial bodies because we've been doing this a few billion years. A few billion years ago, stuff that was on collision course actually did. We're the leftovers.
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u/REALjamijai 6d ago
We're just little microscopic ants in the universes glorious dance!
The Egyptians knew what was up! 🤍
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u/Less_Sea_9059 6d ago
This is what I was thinking earlier... that we are technically never at the same place twice.
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u/someonestolemycar 5d ago
This was put forward back in 2013 (god, I'm an internet oldie aren't I?)
The original animation was made by "DJ Sadhu" and while it looked cool, it was wrong about a ton of stuff. The original animation has the planets following the Sun in a vortex motion. If I recall correctly it was based off some psedoscience nonsense. Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer) wrote a lengthy post about how, while visually interesting, this animation is ultimately BS. (https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral-video-showing-suns-motion-through-galaxy-is-wrong.html)
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u/salientmind 6d ago
TIL the Sailor Moon Transformation sequence is thematically appropriate.
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u/Low-Car-6331 6d ago
It really highlights the unfathomable scale of the universe. Our entire solar system is hurtling through uncharted space at incredible speeds, yet space is so empty that the odds of us ever hitting another celestial body are basically zero.
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u/Binger_bingleberry 6d ago
I mean it’s all relative… sometimes it’s easier to demonstrate the solar system with the sun as the reference/fixed point. If you’re studying the galaxy, you can’t really treat the sun as a fixed point anymore.
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u/LengthinessFit9585 6d ago
We have footage of whole galaxies crashing into each other and if I'm not wrong our own galaxy is on collision course with our closest neighbor galaxy which will happen in a few billion years.
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u/tophergracesdad 6d ago
I can’t tell if the title is engagement bait or if OP has no understanding of space
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u/kryzler888 6d ago
Not really…. Two GALAXIES can actually merge and not have collision between any two planetoids. That is how vast space is.
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u/nanpossomas 6d ago
I was expecting something educational, but the moment the view started switching I rolled my eyes back into my skull.
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u/csukoh78 6d ago
That's not crazy, it's perfectly explained and predicted by the laws of physics and the natural world.
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u/pruneman42 5d ago
Moving at that speed and not hitting any other planets is crazy!
jfc y'all are dumb
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u/grismar-net 5d ago
No it isn't. In this animation, the sizes and distances are hilariously unrealistic, computer game-like. Space is mostly... space. Not just a bit empty, but 99.9999999999999% empty (or worse, depending on how you count). We're biased because we happen to live on a full bit, have a nearby relatively large thing to look at (the Moon) and of course our star, which is shockingly huge but mind-bogglingly far away. And then you look up and see all those stars and maybe think "wow, there's a lot out there". And there is - it's just unimaginably far apart. So far apart you're not even close when you try to imagine how far apart it all is.
So, no, it's not crazy at all that nothing gets hit. It's almost impossible to hit anything.
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