Space and the planets have fascinated mankind for thousands of years. As early as 3,000 BC, the Sumerians named the visible planets after deities. This fascination with the unknown and the far-off still lasts around 5,000 years later, but today we know a lot more. A very interesting video about the actual size and rotation of the planets, which you can find below in the article section, also contributes to this Jupiter turns away
finds.
It comes from Dr. James O’Donogue. He is an ex-NASA employee and currently works at the Japanese space agency Jaxa. He has made it his mission to bring his fascination closer to others. That’s why he regularly posts on Twitter (@physicsJ) and posts videos on Youtube (Interplanetary) online, which he animates himself.
He regularly shows his around 230,000 followers pictures and videos on the topic of space. These include explanations and information about the current night sky or particularly fascinating discoveries, such as a star orbiting a black hole at around 27 million kilometers per hour. That is around 2.6 percent of the speed of light:
link to Twitter content
Size really matters in this case
Most people should know that the planets in our solar system are gigantic. But just how huge they are, how they relate to each other and how they move through space is difficult to imagine. Mainly because the size is misrepresented in many illustrations.
Jupiter, for example, is nearly 30 times larger in diameter than Mercury, but likes to be portrayed as if it were only
seven to ten times as big. There are reasons for this – after all, you can hardly see anything of the smaller planets if you display the ratios correctly. Still, it creates the wrong impression. This is especially true if you also depict the sun.
In the following example you can see the earth next to the sun quite well. In contrast, O’Donoghue’s video below shows that it is actually a tiny, almost imperceptible point compared to the sun.
In this representation, the proportions of the planets are not correct, which often happens.
You don’t have to worry about the right proportions when looking at images from NASA’s James Webb telescope. This article shows you that they are not only beautiful to look at, but are also ideal as desktop backgrounds:
You can use the spectacular NASA photos from the space telescope ideally as wallpaper
Jupiter turns away
in one at Twitter With over 17 million views, James O’Donoghue’s hugely successful video shows the various planets in our solar system ranked by size. What makes the whole thing even more interesting: Compared to other videos of this type, which mostly only aim at the size, he also illustrates the inclination and the rotation speed of the planets:
link to YouTube content
Despite the enormous size of Jupiter, a day there lasts just nine hours and 55 minutes. This corresponds to a rotation speed of 45,000 kilometers per hour. The earth, on the other hand, rotates only
at 1,670 kilometers per hour and thus comes to the well-known 24 hours (or 23.9, if you want to be precise). By far the slowest is Mercury, where a day has a whopping 4,222.6 hours, which corresponds to 175.9 days.
If you are now even more interested in topics from the environment of everything and the stars, then the following article should interest you. In it you will learn what a black hole sounds like:
Warning: creepy! You can now listen to what a black hole sounds like
Did you already know the exact proportions of the planets? And did you know that Jupiter rotates so fast or that Uranus is the only planet that rotates almost vertically? Let us know in the comments!
