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That blew my mind, too, when one of the astrophysicists at the university I was attending grad school at told me this. He also had a telescope set up with a so
by pmiller2 6y ago
That blew my mind, too, when one of the astrophysicists at the university I was attending grad school at told me this. He also had a telescope set up with a solar filter so people could look at the sun. It was moderately active at the time, and I saw this cluster of sunspots that looked quite a lot like the Hawaiian islands. He told me the biggest one was much, much larger than the diameter of the Earth, which also blew my mind.
We're actually kind of lucky to have a fairly typical, main sequence star right in our back yard to study.
- T-hawk 6y agoThere is the anthropic principle regarding that last: if the star wasn't typical and stable, life wouldn't have developed here to observe it.
- bee_rider 6y agoThe anthropic principle doesn't need it to be typically stable though, right? It could be exceptionally stable, in a particularly evil universe, and we'd most likely crop up in a nice little stable oasis.
- eloff 6y agoIf it were unstable during the 4 billion year history of life it could wipe life out and we wouldn't be here to observe it. But it depends on the magnitude of "unstable".
- T-hawk 6y agoOur sun is exceptionally stable - it has no close encounters with other stars that might disrupt planetary orbits, which does happen in galactic nuclei or globular clusters. We are in that nice little stable oasis.