Very cool.

First, I was surprised how large our moon was in comparison to Earth (relatively speaking -- if I were to draw relative sizes of how I guessed they compared, I'd have pegged the moon with half the diameter). Then, I was surprised that the sun wasn't larger in comparison to the planets (I'd have guessed 30% bigger diameter). And then my mind was blown by the sun, an object so immense that it is basically beyond the limit of my human comprehension, being dwarfed by other stars.

I guess the scientific part of my mind has always been best suited towards understanding Biology. With animals there is variation between members of a species, but their physical characteristics generally fall into a bell curve without an extremely high standard deviation; the tallest human to ever live won't be orders of magnitude larger than the shortest. I guess I had been tempted to think of celestial bodies as falling into groups like "species" in animals: asteroids, planetoids, solid planets, gas giants, stars. Clearly I'll have to rethink that, because there aren't many ants the size of a house running around.

I wonder how the physics of things like solar flares, etc. works on those super massive stars -- do their flares scale up in size in a direct linear scale with diameter or mass, or are any increases bound by a more logarithmic scale?

Anyway, thanks for the good sift!

music's a bit cheesy, but good clip nonetheless. Although we have several of those around here and this isn't the best one IMHO.

*promote

Self promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, November 29th, 2009 2:27pm PST - promote requested by original submitter geo321.