Confidemus

Morning troops. How about a little information on my favourite star, Betelgeuse? Betelgeuse is a red supergiant and is one of the most recognisable stars in the sky, as you can it's reddish-orange colour with the naked eye. It's the top left star in the Orion constellation so pretty easy to spot. It's around 600 light years away and is a big fucker. If it were where our Sun is now, it's surface would extend out beyond the asteroid belt, possibly beyond Jupiter, and would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Betelgeuse is also dying. For it's size class, it's already pretty old and could go supernova any time now. It could even have went supernova in the last few hundred years, but because the light takes around 640 years to reach us, we haven't seen it yet. Chances are though, it'll go sometime within the next 100,000 to 1,000,000 years. When it does go supernova, it's brightness will increase by thousands of times and will be as bright in our sky as the moon for days or even weeks. It will be visible during the day and will cast shadows at night. Here's a picture I took of it yesterday:

Not so much a curly wurly more bringing two rolos closer together.

But it's not actually travelling from point a to point b at a speed greater than that of light. It's using a shortcut to lessen the actual distance involved. So rather than the 4.3 light years to get to the closest star to us, you could do it in a wormhole that's theoretically a couple of thousand miles long, for arguement's sake.

To the best of my limited knowledge. rather than travelling faster than light, using a wormhole is simply bending time and space. Think of it as two points at opposite ends of a bit of paper. If you fold the paper over you can greatly narrow the distance between the dots, and your wormhole would bridge that shorter gap.

Bit like this, then?

Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. As for the speed of light thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation

Um, almost 3 o clock #noideawhattheyoungsmanssaying #guesswork

If that is him, he looks like a total and utter gimp. #justsayin'

Ok. Cry? In this fred (sic)? Perish the thought.

Least none of you are upset by my presence. Carry on camping.

This thread could not be any camper if you all donned pink lurex catsuits and skipped through a forest to Kylie Minogue's greatest hits. Utter cringe from start to finish.

Look how much our understanding has came on in the past few decades. Only 3 decades ago, we had never seen a clear picture of Jupiter and the other gas giants. We will always understand more, but there's always the possibility that the more we understand the less we know and the more questions remain unanswered. I doubt the human race will ever fully understand every aspect of the cosmos.

How about some Sun fun, P&Bers? Our own Sun is a G2 Dwarf star. When compared to other stars, is pretty fucking unspectacular, but you could comfortably fit a million Earths inside it. Have a look at this for how tiny and feeble our Sun is: Or, for a direct comparison between our Sun and VY Canis Majoris:

Seeing as how you are one of the "dece" appreciators, your opinion is as relevant and necessary as my Gran's. And she died in 2005.

I would say the vast vast majority of physicists would disagree with that particular model.

Interesting. Care to expand on this Ric? I can't see how the Universe will ever be proved to be any size other than fucking mind blowingly, incomprehensibly gargantuan.

Seeing as how you'd have to travel at 186,000 miles a second for 150 billion years to traverse the fucker, and that's not counting for expansion, we're not even on the beach.

If it wasn't for E4, Channel 5 would be the most pointless television channel in Christendom.

As the great Carl Sagan once said: “The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

On the point of creating an engine or vehicle to go faster than light, other than the problems Ric alluded to, as I said earlier in the thread, to get an object the size of a bowling ball up to 99% of the speed of light would take all the energy used on Earth in a week.

Thanks Ric, you're like my own wee personal auto-correct! I apologise. Direct orbit is what I meant and should have said.

Hiya pals. What would you say the 9th biggest object to orbit the sun is? Ex-planet Pluto? Wrong.. It's Eris, the dwarf planet. Here's a picture I took of it yesterday: You can see it's moon, Dysnomia, just to the left. What the f**k is Eris, I hear you cry? Well, discovered in 2005, Eris is three times further away from the Sun that Pluto is and is 27% more massive than Pluto, although recent discoveries place it around the same size as Pluto. It was initially given the title of tenth planet in the Solar System, but was reclassified to being a dwarf planet along with Pluto, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake. Eris and it's moon Dysnomia are currently the most distant known natural objects in the solar system.

Not when he's written it off, you can't.

Throw in a tub of humous and you have yourself a deal, young man.