How tiny our sun is compared to other stars

[petra]

Has anyone else marvelled at how tiny our sun is compared to other stars? I appreciate the sun, and I find myself thinking about it a lot. I guess you could say, I'm worried about the sun - for no apparent reason.

I found this image (which kind of makes me want to vomit), and look how tiny Arcturus is. I always thought of Arcturus as a "really huge star". It's a speck! You can't even see the sun it's so small.

https://www.newtondesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Biggest-Stars-of-our-Milky-way-galaxy.jpg

[Did You See Them]

Mind Boggling isn't it ! and that's just from our perspective of what we know as large and small.
Yet our universe itself could conceivably be "anothers" idea of small !!

[yelik]

What if our solar system is an atom and the universe is a complex molecule or DNA chain?

[Intranuclear]

What if our solar system is an atom and the universe is a complex molecule or DNA chain?

LOL, reminds me when I was a teenager and saying that exactly to my cousin.
The universe seems to be fractal, so this is a natural thought.
Ever play with mathematical fractals?

[petra]

If I'm made of light, does that make me a hologram or not? Just playing, that's rhetorical :)

A friend of mine said when he looked at our nervous system, he could see some kind of pattern that looked like the universe. I'm doing a terrible job at paraphrasing, and I don't see the pattern but I did get his point. His point was that fractal pattern is where the "infinity" comes from, and it's all just a "matter of scale".

[Intranuclear]

If I'm made of light, does that make me a hologram or not? Just playing, that's rhetorical :)

A friend of mine said when he looked at our nervous system, he could see some kind of pattern that looked like the universe. I'm doing a terrible job at paraphrasing, and I don't see the pattern but I did get his point. His point was that fractal pattern is where the "infinity" comes from, and it's all just a "matter of scale".

Indeed, check this out.
the image on the left is a single neuron and the picture on the right are electrical connections between galaxies.
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F01%2F0815-sci-webSCIILLO.jpg

This is one of many articles: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/01/23/ask-ethan-is-the-universe-itself-alive/#12b07c4431bb

[petra]

If I'm made of light, does that make me a hologram or not? Just playing, that's rhetorical :)

A friend of mine said when he looked at our nervous system, he could see some kind of pattern that looked like the universe. I'm doing a terrible job at paraphrasing, and I don't see the pattern but I did get his point. His point was that fractal pattern is where the "infinity" comes from, and it's all just a "matter of scale".

Indeed, check this out.
the image on the left is a single neuron and the picture on the right are electrical connections between galaxies.


That's exactly what he was talking about, and these particular images are strikingly similar, thank you! This illustrates what I was thinking of perfectly.

[shaberon]

Regulus is many times larger than our sun, but its day, or period of rotation, is less than twenty-four hours.

Four times solar size is roughly Aldebaran. I'd guess those larger ones are not very common.

[pluton]

If I'm made of light, does that make me a hologram or not? Just playing, that's rhetorical :)

A friend of mine said when he looked at our nervous system, he could see some kind of pattern that looked like the universe. I'm doing a terrible job at paraphrasing, and I don't see the pattern but I did get his point. His point was that fractal pattern is where the "infinity" comes from, and it's all just a "matter of scale".

Indeed, check this out.
the image on the left is a single neuron and the picture on the right are electrical connections between galaxies.
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F01%2F0815-sci-webSCIILLO.jpg

This is one of many articles: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/01/23/ask-ethan-is-the-universe-itself-alive/#12b07c4431bb

The similarity between a neuron with its dendrites and those "electrical connection between galaxies" is not just coincidental, because the whole universe is the brain of God who doesn't have a body just brain. It is said in the Bible that God "was sorry that He had made man on the earth...." The regret stemmed from the fact that he had not experienced a headache before. Hundreds of supernovae trashing their surroundings at once is a tickle in comparison to that tiny planet near the sun with all those... those... Where the heck are my Tylenol gas clouds???

[daveywales]

Yes I knew 'our' sun was a dwarf star but seeing the comparison is mindboggling!

What else I find mindboggling is the size and distance away from us is not just perfect for life on this amazing planet of 'ours', but is it is perfect for the shadow of the moon when the Earth is directly behind it in relation to the sun to cover the sun exactly 100%, with the precision of the pyramid builders, so we see the sun disappear completely for a minute or so and everything seems to hold it's breath. Then we get that wondrous diamond appear as the Earth still sits in this suspended silent darkness for another minute before the spell is broken as the sun emerges from behind the shadow of the moon.

If that is not amazing enough due to the sizes and distances of the sun, moon, and Earth, a three way dance of precision again of the pyramid builders, causing total lunar eclipses and blood red moons, blue moons, harvest moons and the list goes on.

Why did I use the builders of the pyramids as the example of precision? Well from the Giza pyramids and some of the main Mayan pyramids including the sun and moon pyramids, using mathematics we can extrapolate the sizes and distances away from each other of the Earth, moon and sun, their rotation cycles, speed of the rotation and God knows how much more. (apologies for all the 'and's' but I ain't that clever!)

What another example of the incredible world we live in/on....?!

This is my first substantial post and I must apologise for noticing after posting I have drifted off topic by not keeping with the 'comparison' of the size of our sun with other suns. Instead I have written about the precision positioning of the sun in comparison with the Earth and moon-SORRY

[Sunny-side-up]

As within, so without.

Great post/discussion.

The comparison of the neuron with its dendrites and those "electrical connection between galaxies, well it probably goes on with the multiverse.

[yelik]

What if our solar system is an atom and the universe is a complex molecule or DNA chain?

LOL, reminds me when I was a teenager and saying that exactly to my cousin.
The universe seems to be fractal, so this is a natural thought.
Ever play with mathematical fractals?

For sure mathematics and geometry are one of the corner stones of the Universe and everything else within it

More interesting thoughts - Cosmology of the Universe


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nPXy7glhAk&feature=em-uploademail

[Star Tsar]

Dearest Petra if I may I will interject this visual representation...

u8zMAAHDb54

[petra]

Infinity... limits... giant stars.
I wonder if there's a limit to how big a star can get? I'm going to say there probably is.
I looked it up quickly, and the theoretical limit keeps rising. There has to be a limit though, I imagine so.

How big can stars get? The theoretical size limit for the biggest stars keeps going up! Today, it's thought stars can't be more massive than 150 times our sun's mass.
(ref: https://earthsky.org/space/shedding-light-on-a-stars-mass-limit)

[Bill Ryan]

Has anyone else marvelled at how tiny our sun is compared to other stars? I appreciate the sun, and I find myself thinking about it a lot. I guess you could say, I'm worried about the sun - for no apparent reason.



No need to be worried. Nothing's going to come along and eat it up! Our sun is an enormous, fierce, self-sustaining beast, billions of years old.

:muscle: :sun: :muscle:

It's us who are tiny. :)

[petra]

Has anyone else marvelled at how tiny our sun is compared to other stars? I appreciate the sun, and I find myself thinking about it a lot. I guess you could say, I'm worried about the sun - for no apparent reason.



No need to be worried. Nothing's going to come along and eat it up! Our sun is an enormous, fierce, self-sustaining beast, billions of years old.

:muscle: :sun: :muscle:

It's us who are tiny. :)


The sun will die eventually though, so it's not really self sustaining. They all die eventually. Plenty more where that came from though :)

[pluton]

The sun will die eventually though, so it's not really self sustaining. They all die eventually. Plenty more where that came from though :)
UY Scuti is a hypergiant, the largest known star, but its mass is only about 30x larger than our sun, and it is too far away to be of any consequence when it blows perhaps tens of millions of years from now. The star that is expected to become a supernova roughly within 0 to 100,000 years is Betelgeuse (15x to 20x more massive than the sun).

"Given the estimated time since Betelgeuse became a red supergiant, estimates of its remaining lifetime range from a "best guess" of under 100,000 years for a non-rotating 20 M☉ model to far longer for rotating models or lower-mass stars."

When it blows, "It may outshine the full moon and would be easily visible in daylight." That means if Betelgeuse already blew in 1367 AD, we will see "two moons" shortly.

[Didgevillage]

Does size matter? Yes, and No.
We may be puny, puny humans, but we can expand our mind as large as the Milky Way galaxy, which may be a tiny thing in the whole scheme of things.

[Did You See Them]

Has anyone else marvelled at how tiny our sun is compared to other stars? I appreciate the sun, and I find myself thinking about it a lot. I guess you could say, I'm worried about the sun - for no apparent reason.



No need to be worried. Nothing's going to come along and eat it up! Our sun is an enormous, fierce, self-sustaining beast, billions of years old.

:muscle: :sun: :muscle:

It's us who are tiny. :)

Size is like time - It's all a matter of the perspective of the observer.

[leavesoftrees]

This website brings in a few comparison images of the earth and sun

https://www.co-intelligence.org/newsletter/comparisons.html

[Omni]

omitted to prevent theft by the pathetic...

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

I've watched several of these, and this one gives me goosebumps. It will slightly frighten you as to the true scale of things.

Anyone who still thinks we might be alone in the Universe needs to see this.

GoW8Tf7hTGA

[Praxis]

The stars are indeed big but the thing that truly change my opinion on what it means to be very big is Graham Number

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuigptwlVHo

Prepare to feel smaller than you already probably do based on stars.

[petra]

Size is like time - It's all a matter of the perspective of the observer.

What a great quote! I think I must have imagined myself in the future or something, and I know worrying about the sun is foolish.

What a thought. Us outlasting the Sun. I guess I can see how that could be possible though ... (minus our bodies)

[Sunny-side-up]

Those galaxies, just looked so much like multi celled amoeba's.
If we observed them from a far, far greater speed of time perspective (Far, far greater speed of time 0.o, Frequency) we would see them jostling and bumping into each other.
And so in "time" becoming larger organisms, and so on, and so on, outwards and not forgetting inwards.
As without, so within.

We are a midway point within all of that.
We exist in a universe and contain universes within us.
Each one of you are a mass of universes interacting, (hopefully not colliding with me) with me.

We are also ONE as a whole :sun:

cool ha.

[petra]

Those galaxies, just looked so much like multi celled amoeba's.
If we observed them from a far, far greater speed of time perspective (Far, far greater speed of time 0.o, Frequency) we would see them jostling and bumping into each other.
And so in "time" becoming larger organisms, and so on, and so on, outwards and not forgetting inwards.
As without, so within.

We are a midway point within all of that.
We exist in a universe and contain universes within us.
Each one of you are a mass of universes interacting, (hopefully not colliding with me) with me.

We are also ONE as a whole :sun:

cool ha.

As without so within?! That's funny, I like it :) That works "backwards" too. Or should I say "opposite" ;-)

I'm trying not to collide with anybody, but I don't think I can help it. If that's true, apologies in advance.




The sun will die eventually though, so it's not really self sustaining. They all die eventually. Plenty more where that came from though :)
UY Scuti is a hypergiant, the largest known star, but its mass is only about 30x larger than our sun, and it is too far away to be of any consequence when it blows perhaps tens of millions of years from now. The star that is expected to become a supernova roughly within 0 to 100,000 years is Betelgeuse (15x to 20x more massive than the sun).

"Given the estimated time since Betelgeuse became a red supergiant, estimates of its remaining lifetime range from a "best guess" of under 100,000 years for a non-rotating 20 M☉ model to far longer for rotating models or lower-mass stars."

When it blows, "It may outshine the full moon and would be easily visible in daylight." That means if Betelgeuse already blew in 1367 AD, we will see "two moons" shortly.

I cringe when you say "UY Scuti", pluton! I wonder why couldn't the person who named Arcturus have named that one too? (sarcasm). We could call it... "Monstrus", ha ha. You don't want to know what kind of names I come up with... there's a reason we don't let little kids name stars ;-)

Anybody want to give UY Scuti a new name, just for fun?

[DaveToo]

This seems like an appropriate enough thread to make my post.

I had been thinking about it for a few weeks now.

It ties into this thread, UFO threads and even the 'The 1963 TV show - The Outer Limits' thread.

Almost all the UFO sightings that I read/hear about, ET contact etc. deal with objects/beings that are
human-like experience in proportion.

That is to say when we hear of a UFO sighting the spaceship is 'plane-size' or thereabouts. Maybe two, three, five, ten times the size etc.
Same with the ET sightings; human-like experience in proportion/size.

But does this make sense?

Just look how small our sun is in comparison to the other stars in our galaxy.

Why shouldn't a spaceship that is visiting us be 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???
Same goes for the ET's that are reported. Why aren't they 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???

It seems like an awfully strange coincidence that all our reports/sightings are human-like experience in proportion/size.

[Bill Ryan]

Why shouldn't a spaceship that is visiting us be 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???
Same goes for the ET's that are reported. Why aren't they 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???


Gravity plays a critical role here, regarding body proportion. That's why mosquitoes and spiders have spindly legs, and elephants and hippos have big fat ones.

It's connected to the length/height to volume ratio. Something 2x as high/long is 8x as heavy, with the same proportions. If you enlarged a mosquito 1000x, it'd not be able to stand and would collapse and crush itself under its own weight.

Presumably, the same goes with ETs that might have two legs as we do. An intelligent creature that weighed tens or hundreds of tons (whichever planet it lived on) would need to be aquatic to support its own weight... maybe like whales. :)

:focus:

[pluton]

Almost all the UFO sightings that I read/hear about, ET contact etc. deal with objects/beings that are
human-like experience in proportion.

That is to say when we hear of a UFO sighting the spaceship is 'plane-size' or thereabouts. Maybe two, three, five, ten times the size etc.
Same with the ET sightings; human-like experience in proportion/size.

But does this make sense?

Just look how small our sun is in comparison to the other stars in our galaxy.

Why shouldn't a spaceship that is visiting us be 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???
Same goes for the ET's that are reported. Why aren't they 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???

It seems like an awfully strange coincidence that all our reports/sightings are human-like experience in proportion/size.

That's a bad analogy, because stars are of a natural origin, whereas spaceships are not. Also, life cannot evolve on the stars for obvious reason, so the size of the alien life doesn't depend on the size of the stars, but it can be affected by the size of those planets, which are kind to evolution.

But you have a point in saying that we are not told about alien creatures that are likely to be much bigger than we are:

"Aliens, if they exist, are likely huge. At least that’s the conclusion of a new paper by cosmologist Fergus Simpson, who has estimated that the average weight of intelligent extraterrestrials would be 650 pounds (300 kilograms) or more. ET would have paled in comparison to these interstellar behemoths."
https://www.newsweek.com/aliens-are-enormous-science-suggests-319448

Of course, there are notable extremes out there, such as the massive and now extinct Procurians who would weigh here on Earth 800 metric tons on average, and who had six legs and a set of 120 teeth.

[Pam]

This seems like an appropriate enough thread to make my post.

I had been thinking about it for a few weeks now.

It ties into this thread, UFO threads and even the 'The 1963 TV show - The Outer Limits' thread.

Almost all the UFO sightings that I read/hear about, ET contact etc. deal with objects/beings that are
human-like experience in proportion.

That is to say when we hear of a UFO sighting the spaceship is 'plane-size' or thereabouts. Maybe two, three, five, ten times the size etc.
Same with the ET sightings; human-like experience in proportion/size.

But does this make sense?

Just look how small our sun is in comparison to the other stars in our galaxy.

Why shouldn't a spaceship that is visiting us be 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???
Same goes for the ET's that are reported. Why aren't they 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???

It seems like an awfully strange coincidence that all our reports/sightings are human-like experience in proportion/size.

This makes a lot of sense to me. What an interesting thought. You are so right, why always within the parameters of practicality for earthlings? If beings from one of these huge planets are human size, they would essentially be ants on their planets as far as size goes. I love your creative thinking processes DaveToo!


Also, it seems really plausible that beings sophisticated enough to travel to earth from afar probably could very well have the ability to work around gravity. The other side of the coin is if we are in a holographic reality, which I am becoming more prone to believe, anything goes. I do believe that this would be a good explanation as to why everything is "sized" to our reality.

[petra]

"Aliens, if they exist, are likely huge. At least that’s the conclusion of a new paper by cosmologist Fergus Simpson, who has estimated that the average weight of intelligent extraterrestrials would be 650 pounds (300 kilograms) or more. ET would have paled in comparison to these interstellar behemoths."
https://www.newsweek.com/aliens-are-enormous-science-suggests-319448


This actually makes sense, and now I feel tiny again!

I've been watching too much Star Trek and just assumed aliens would be similar size to us, or at the most, the size of a large animal.





Why shouldn't a spaceship that is visiting us be 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???
Same goes for the ET's that are reported. Why aren't they 100 or 1000+ times the size that we always report???


Gravity plays a critical role here, regarding body proportion. That's why mosquitoes and spiders have spindly legs, and elephants and hippos have big fat ones.

It's connected to the length/height to volume ratio. Something 2x as high/long is 8x as heavy, with the same proportions. If you enlarged a mosquito 1000x, it'd not be able to stand and would collapse and crush itself under its own weight.

Presumably, the same goes with ETs that might have two legs as we do. An intelligent creature that weighed tens or hundreds of tons (whichever planet it lived on) would need to be aquatic to support its own weight... maybe like whales. :)

:focus:

I love how different topics are kind of converging, it's really making people think, myself included! I'm not wasting any more time trying to give the stars names - that was a fun exercise though :)

I didn't consider what would happen if a mosquito was gigantic, that really helps illustrate things. Gravity is playing a huge part everywhere, and I'm pretty sure is the same reason why stars have a (theoretical) size limit.

EDIT: Pretty sure gravity affects light too, even though it sounds kind of weird. It just makes sense that gravity would affect everything, to me.

[DaveToo]

That's a bad analogy, because stars are of a natural origin, whereas spaceships are not. Also, life cannot evolve on the stars for obvious reason, so the size of the alien life doesn't depend on the size of the stars, but it can be affected by the size of those planets, which are kind to evolution.

But you have a point in saying that we are not told about alien creatures that are likely to be much bigger than we are:

...

pluton I am honoring Bill's request to be on-topic here.
So I have responded to your post in the other forum under topic "Sighting size".

[pluton]

I cringe when you say "UY Scuti", pluton! I wonder why couldn't the person who named Arcturus have named that one too? (sarcasm). We could call it... "Monstrus", ha ha. You don't want to know what kind of names I come up with... there's a reason we don't let little kids name stars ;-)

Anybody want to give UY Scuti a new name, just for fun?

The name Scuti originated at the time when the biggest known star up to date was discovered back in 1860 by a German astronomer in the Bonn Observatory. He was scanning the skies for something interesting, peering into the oculus, when an unexpected voice beside him said: "Let me show you something really special." The astronomer looked to his right where the voice came from and virtually froze. There stood a guy with really pronounced insect features!!! According to the astronomer's description he gave to an artist, the creature looked like this (http://orig02.deviantart.net/024f/f/2012/155/b/c/insect_alien_by_stillenacht-d52akoh.jpg).

That alien creature handed the shocked astronomer a slip of paper with celestial coordinates scribbled on it and walked away. When the astronomer came back to his senses, he reoriented the telescope according to the instruction, and indeed - there was a star that appeared to deserve some attention. Since the astronomer was of Anglo-Italian descend, he named the star Scuti - a name that he derived from the word "scutum," being mindful of his hard-to-believe experience.

scutum (entomology) - the second dorsal sclerite in each thoracic segment of an insect.

[petra]

I cringe when you say "UY Scuti", pluton! I wonder why couldn't the person who named Arcturus have named that one too? (sarcasm). We could call it... "Monstrus", ha ha. You don't want to know what kind of names I come up with... there's a reason we don't let little kids name stars ;-)

Anybody want to give UY Scuti a new name, just for fun?

The name Scuti originated at the time when the biggest known star up to date was discovered back in 1860 by a German astronomer in the Bonn Observatory. He was scanning the skies for something interesting, peering into the oculus, when an unexpected voice beside him said: "Let me show you something really special." The astronomer looked to his right where the voice came from and virtually froze. There stood a guy with really pronounced insect features!!! According to the astronomer's description he gave to an artist, the creature looked like this (http://orig02.deviantart.net/024f/f/2012/155/b/c/insect_alien_by_stillenacht-d52akoh.jpg).

That alien creature handed the shocked astronomer a slip of paper with celestial coordinates scribbled on it and walked away. When the astronomer came back to his senses, he reoriented the telescope according to the instruction, and indeed - there was a star that appeared to deserve some attention. Since the astronomer was of Anglo-Italian descend, he named the star Scuti - a name that he derived from the word "scutum," being mindful of his hard-to-believe experience.

scutum (entomology) - the second dorsal sclerite in each thoracic segment of an insect.

I'm too surprised NOT to respond to this, sorry for straying off of the topic too, it's just already gone off topic and getting really interesting. I don't mind if the topic needs to be changed to something else.

I did NOT expect to get a little tale of how Scuti got it's name! If this is true, that's just amazing. Suspicious too though. I mean, thanks for pointing out the humongous star that we missed, but what are they doing that for? There's surely lots of other stuff we missed too (like.. the aliens?)

¤=[Post Update]=¤


omitted to prevent theft by the pathetic...

Oh Omni, this posting is making me feel all kinds of things. Stop making me laugh and cry at the same time....