Recent comments in /f/space

OverPower314 t1_j9blw2l wrote

Reply to comment by conorsoliga in Stars by Electronic_Tale_5756

Actually most stars are red dwarfs, which are about half the size of the Sun. Sure, there are plenty of stars way bigger, but our Sun is still larger than the majority. (Although perhaps it's different when it comes to stars visible with the naked eye, given that larger stars are far brighter. I'm not entirely sure.)

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LordSalem t1_j9bkr11 wrote

Reply to The Tadpole galaxy by Hubble, Its eye-catching tail is about 280,000 light-years long. Also known as UGC 10214 and Arp 188, it is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Credit Image: NASA/ESA/HST/STScI. by Davicho77

Imagine you're on a rock in a solar system for thousands of years, you develop a civilization and just as you're starting to explore a night sky you realize another galaxy will collide with the one you're in. Years and years of preparation and you've calculated your planet will be ok, but your entire solar system will change trajectory away from the galactic center. Any hope you had of finding life in a nearby solar system is gone. Your civilization will never be trapped, alone, on this one rock for eternity.

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conorsoliga t1_j9bk2da wrote

Reply to Stars by Electronic_Tale_5756

They are all stars like our sun(a few are planets like Venus, Jupiter etc), and the majority of them are actually way bigger than our sun. Just super super far away.

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de_hell t1_j9bikgq wrote

Reply to comment by SeriousPuppet in The Tadpole galaxy by Hubble, Its eye-catching tail is about 280,000 light-years long. Also known as UGC 10214 and Arp 188, it is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Credit Image: NASA/ESA/HST/STScI. by Davicho77

Even if God created this universe and we are the only ones in this colosally big universe, it would be such a waste of all that space lol.

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SeriousPuppet t1_j9bhw21 wrote

Reply to comment by de_hell in The Tadpole galaxy by Hubble, Its eye-catching tail is about 280,000 light-years long. Also known as UGC 10214 and Arp 188, it is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Credit Image: NASA/ESA/HST/STScI. by Davicho77

I agree. There are so many stars and planets that there has to be at least a few other planets with life. Perhaps many thousands or millions. But at least a few. We can't be the only one in the entire universe.

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Kossimer t1_j9bhim2 wrote

Reply to comment by wowsosquare in The Tadpole galaxy by Hubble, Its eye-catching tail is about 280,000 light-years long. Also known as UGC 10214 and Arp 188, it is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Credit Image: NASA/ESA/HST/STScI. by Davicho77

The interstellar medium is less dense outside of galaxies, but it's already very sparse and it doesn't do much. It makes no difference to a star system that might be outside of a galaxy.

A star would have to make a near pass with a black hole or a neutron star to be slingshot into relativistic speeds, which almost certainly would not happen to a single star in a galaxy collision, statistically speaking. A star does not need to travel nearly the speed of light to escape a galaxy, but stars also almost never escape anyway because galactic collisions are so rare and are one of the few events capable of doing it. More likely, a star that escapes a galaxy is somewhere in a tail of matter being pulled away slowly from its home galaxy via a collision like pictured in the post, in a small chunk that the galaxy's gravity never recaptures.

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Super_Automatic t1_j9bfeiy wrote

Reply to comment by kipperforskipper in The Tadpole galaxy by Hubble, Its eye-catching tail is about 280,000 light-years long. Also known as UGC 10214 and Arp 188, it is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Credit Image: NASA/ESA/HST/STScI. by Davicho77

How is this bad? Once life has already formed, there is no evidence that belonging to a galaxy is of any use.

It may in fact be advantageous to be in the an area of reduced density, as there is a reduced probability of 'debris'. It is noted in fact, that our own sun travels in a way which oscillates above and below the galactic plane, and that we are currently above the galactic plane, which may explain why we have not experienced outsized meteor events.

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PhilosophyEconomy873 t1_j9bdxsm wrote

Reply to comment by ajamesmccarthy in I spent 20 hours shooting the Horsehead nebula to create my most intricately detailed photo of this region. This area is surprisingly large, and if it were brighter it would appear much larger than the full moon. Make sure you zoom in! [OC] by ajamesmccarthy

Thank you, it blows my mind! I will look further into it and how different element signatures are visible, lots of reading for me.

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