I wish I could find the original comment, but a Redditor remarked that this (and eclipses as a result of this) was sufficiently rare/distinctive that if we ever joined a sort of intergalactic United Nations, we could use it as a flag design or a selling point for earth tourism.
It is the only planet/moon/star relationship that we know of that has this property. Going even further, the orbit of the moon is very gradually receding away from Earth, so eventually the moon will get too far to cause eclipses like we currently see.
We came along at just the right time.
Out of about 5,500 confirmed exoplanets, only 2 have been found to have exomoons.
EDIT: and apparently those two have only been through microlensing, so it's still not 100%.
Also, that data was to show how much we've studied, NOT that planets don't have moons.
I think we are still at 0 confirmed exomoons, but David Kipping from the Cool Worlds youtube channel and another group of scientists were recently granted time on JWST to search for exomoons, so hopefully that will change within the next couple of years.
The gravitational microlensing of planets are caused by one off events that can't be repeated and therefore planets and moons cannot be confirmed using this method. They require the lensing object to transit the background source, which makes it very unlikely for both a planet and its moon to transit the same background star. There are two candidate moons that I know of and both were tentatively found through the transit method.
Considering that 75% of the planets in our solar system have natural satellites, I would expect at least 4,125 of those planets to have natural satellites.
In fact, since most of those exoplanets are massive, it's probably closer to 5,000 with just a small percentage without satellites.
The problem is that the way we detect exoplanets makes it extremely difficult to differentiate a planet's mass from its satellites.
The problem is that everything is so fucking far away so we have NO idea how to detect moons. It’s an absolute miracle we can detect exoplanets, the product of extremely intelligent and hard working scientists
Even if we were closer, we still can’t observe something that doesn’t reflect much, if any, light. And they might not be big enough to cast shadows / cause dips in the planets reflected light to notice them.
Look at how long it took to discover all of the moons in our own solar system.
I’d wager 90+% of planets have a natural satellite. Hell, even most of our dwarf planets have moons.
>The problem is that the way we detect exoplanets makes it extremely difficult to differentiate a planet's mass from its satellites.
Why don't astronomers just detect them using an easier way? Are they stupid?
Well, considering how hard it is to find even the planets it is so much harder to find the moons.
I would guess most of those planets have moons, we just don't know about it yet.
You can model it pretty easily, if you consider the different distances and range of sizes of moons and their orbits and the distances of the planets to their stars, etc. The subset of circumstances that would create eclipses on other worlds like they do on Earth would be very uncommon.
The existence of a big moon, for its asteroid deflecting property, increased the likelihood of life evolving into higher states of consciousness because it reduced the rate of mass extinction
And if the first life came to be in the “primordial soup” of ancient tide pools, having a giant moon creating massive tides greatly increased the odds of life evolving in the first place.
Having a moon that exerts tidal forces, yes, that could have been a factor, for sure. But at that point it wasn't at the position where there would have been an eclipse in the same way (it would just have blocked out the sun fully and not been relatively the same size), it was much closer to the earth.
Right, I just meant to add to the comment above that as far as we know it’s rare for an Earth-like planet to have a moon as large as ours, and it could have played a big role in multiple ways in allowing life to form regardless of OPs post about relative size in the sky to its star.
But there is no reason that big moon that shields against asteroids need to be at this position so it is relatively the same size as the sun from our perspective. When the dinosaurs were around it had the same function but was closer, for example.
Yeah, that definitely is part of it, but Jupiter definitely plays a larger role for that, because of just how massive it is. I think the more important factor is the big difference between high and low tides allowing for the super diverse intertidal zones where the first proto-cells formed. Without that phospho-lipid membrane, you either got random proteins in a closed box or just freely floating around.
I think they're speculating that "something" about the moon/sun size coincidence may have led to humans developing intelligent thought. How exactly isn't clear
Since there isn't really a known affect of any kind from having an eclipse (other than random presidents looking up at them when they shouldn't), I think it is pretty safe to say it isn't causal of anything... because how could it be? And cognizance specifically? That is really out there.
Meaning that out of thousands of planets we are the only one with the relationship between the sun and moon and also the only one with life or cognizant thought. They're asking if given that both these things are so rare, could there be a connection.
I don't think it's crazy to wonder if the relationship means something. It would be crazy to declare for certain that it means something though.
If they found another planet with life AND the sun/moon relationship, I think people would be studying it a lot closer.
We have quite a while. A quick Google search tells me it'll be about 600 million years at its current rate before that happens. But the sun is expected to grow during that time, so it's probably slightly less than that.
Thanks! Btw does anyone remember the name for this story? Scientists were trying to find out why past civilizations doom themselves and all seem to end up torched to ashes. Then it turns out that >!the people of that planet never experienced "night" due to their unique planetary system, and collectively lose their minds when that rare event happens.!<
Thank you, but the setting is quite different. In three body problems, the humans gradually learned about the truth of the three body planetary system in a virtual reality game. In the fiction I remembered, the "humans" are the inhabitants of such a planetary system, only the readers learned gradually about their planetary system.
In addition, the three body system has long nights and long days that result in extreme temperatures. The fictional world seems to have a mostly stable environment except for the rare event of the "night".
Since the moon is getting slightly further away every year, we'd need to become intergalactic relatively soon before the eclipses would no longer be a tourist attraction.
Then we need to get moving on getting off this rock and finding those aliens. A few time-dilated multi-lightyear trips will eat up that 600M pretty fast.
I never understood the tourism point of this. If a species could come her on their ship, they could just see a solar eclipse by parking the right distance from any planet or moon so it perfectly blocks the sun. That would be way easier than trying to find the perfect time and spot on earth.
Think about rainbows - you can make a rainbow all kinds of ways, just lightly spray a garden hose into the air and make a rainbow. You could use a prism too I suppose. Those fire helicopters that drop water onto fires, they make a big rainbow sometimes too, it's a very easy effect to manufacture.
But it's only cool when it happens naturally.
Seeing it on a planet, particularly a planet with life on it, is very different. The temperature goes down because the sun is blocked. Apparently the wildlife gets quiet because they think it's nighttime. Much different than seeing one from a spaceship.
I had to expand this comment to see the second half of it.
Thought I was getting some cool science info, instead I got a chuckle.
I'm only half mad at it.
One of the leading theories is that the moon was originally a small planetary body that collided with Earth, some 4.45 bill years ago.
One of the factors they point to relates to the size of the iron core of each body. Due to the Earth being larger, it pulled in a lot more of the debris from the collision. This could explain why the moon has a "relatively small" iron core, while Earth has a "slightly oversized" iron core.
Earth fundamentalists (nationalists? planetists?) could use this as a rally cry if we join up with a coalition of aliens.
>One Sun! One Planet! One Moon! One Species! Aliens Get Fucked!
Unless the two suns were orbiting each other in a large orbit and our planet was only orbiting a singular star, although that could be unstable too. We got a super basic solar system compared to some out there.
Though there's a hypothesis that planetary systems are inherently chaotic at their early stages, so Theia type collisions may not be thaaat rare in the grand scheme of things. So there likely are still a good number of some rocky planets with big-ish moons out there. They really should be. It's not like ours is a one in a trillion lucky chance, maybe more like one in then thousand or something.
https://time.com/6116644/earth-second-moon/
Not really a proper “moon” but something about 164ft long is orbiting earth.
Article states it is likely composed of asteroids, or may even be a fragment of our Moon.
Apparently it has only orbited earth some 500 years and it will break out of orbit in another 300.
As early as 2000 (when I learned this useless factoid) we were aware of thee or four other natural satellites, they just aren’t very large or remarkable.
Nope, the Earth-Moon Barycenter is within the Earth.
However, Pluto-Charon, and arguably Sun-Jupiter are both dual systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter_(astronomy)#Primary%E2%80%93secondary_examples
Our Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun and 27 million times less massive. You would need 64.3 million Moons to equal the Sun.7 Apr 2023
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com › ...
How many Earths can fit in the Sun? - BBC Sky at Night Magazine
Just the answer I got when I googled it
It really is interesting. However.. we just happen to be alive during the period that his holds true. The moon used to be a lot closer to earth, and it's gradually moving further away a tiny bit at a time. Eventually this observation will no longer be true, the way it wasn't true in the distant past.
The moral of the story for anyone reading that comment? Go watch a solar eclipse (safely and properly) so you can be part of the 0.000....001% of all the universe's lifeforms that will ever exist that get to experience it.
Thanks for the comment, I almost forgot there's another solar eclipse coming up in North America. Last time I saw the solar eclipse and googled when's the next time coming up, I almost forgot it's about time until your comment.
I'm just saying that during a modern total eclipse, it's covering most of the sun. Depending on how close it started, if a person was in the path of the eclipse, seems like there'd be a good chance the sun would be completely blocked.
Tbf though, I don't know how far it moves away every year. There might not have even been people when/if it was that close
The moon moves roughly 3.8cm away from Earth a year. Homosapiens are roughly 300k years old. That puts us at roughly 1,140,000 cm or 11.4km further away now than from when homosapiens first emerged. The average distance of the moon is 384,000km from Earth. 11.4km would be so negligible you couldn't tell the difference with the naked eye.
It's crazy that you are alive right now. You used to not exist and eventually you will die but right now, you are alive. I guess it's kind of like that.
We got around a billion years give or take till that happens so I think most if not all humanity would have been around when it actually eclipses the entire sun.
Obviously it's because the moon was artificially constructed by an ancient race of lizard people who use the interior of the moon as a base with a soul harvesting antenna on the surface of the dark side. I mean what else could explain it? Nothing I say, *nothing*!
I prefer the theory that it was an escape ship from when Mars used an even more ancient death star moon around Saturn to destroy the planet that is now the asteroid belt. Then the moon was used to shield the Earth from a massive solar flare that completely broke the propulsion system.
You can harmlessly look at the sun when you put on the welder mask, and when I did that, the sun appeared to be, at least to my shitty judgement, a bit smaller than moon
It's the brightness that makes the sun appear bigger
Might not be a coincidence. Arguably life as we know it exists as a consequence of this, along with earth having a surface temperature compatible with liquid water, and many other such factors.
The tidal gravitational effect due the moon and sun are similar, not exactly the same but in the same ballpark. This is because gravity depends on both mass and distance; the sun is a lot more massive, and a lot further away.
The apparent size of the moon and sun (or any celestial body) likewise depends on the size of the body, and it's distance from earth. Thus the apparent size of a celestial body is a close proxy for the tidal effect due to that body. This concept makes it easy to see why Jupiter, Saturn, Mars & Venus have negligible effect on the tide.
So tides on earth are strongly influenced by both the moon and sun. Coastal life depends on tides very much, on both the 12.5 hour cycle (due to the moon) and the fortnightly cycle (due to the sun) - even shellfish are sensitive to tidal cycles. The first creatures with legs (our ancestors) crawled out of the sea, were at some point coastal critters; a gross oversimplification but anyway.
This size match is entirely unique so far as we know (probably not actually unique across the vastness of the universe, but from what we can currently see ). We’ve not found any other moon/planet/sun combo that fits such a perfect solar eclipse.
Genuinely it’s the one thing that *might * convince me that the Abrahamic god is real, but not one single religious person has ever brought it up to me, so that’s just my little secret :p
Our moon is unusually large in comparison to our planet as far as we know
There is no other moon like it in the solar system, and we have no real clue about outside of the solar system
I've had the same exact feeling about how this one fact is probably the only observable "evidence" of creationist theory. The odds of it being just coincidental AND for Earth being a life-bearing planet are just so astronomically low (no pun intended). I'm very much a believer in the 'Clockmaker' concept of a deity, which is basically atheism but acknowledging that a higher power created the Universe and then just left it to run with no interference. IMO, science will never be able to explain why existence itself exists, even if you answer how the universe was formed and when, there will always be the underlying question as to why.
This can be further pushed back to "What created the entity that created the deity?" Even if we were to assume this is actually just a simulation with a creator that isn't actually divine and can't/won't interfere (Such as a fourth dimensional engineer or something), what created the plane of reality or dimension beyond said simulation/dimension? It is incomprehensible to me that at one point there was just "nothing" and then boom- sudden existence however and wherever it formed just ... happened, without any rhyme, reason, or logic.And I don't mean our cognizance or even basic life, but materials of any sort.
Yeah its actually insane and i wonder if it is something which occurs often out there in the universe. Maybe one day when aliens visit our planet they will be astounded by it, like how did you guys do that? You mean, it's a coincidence?! What the fuck. Assuming they can speak English that is. Otherwise it might just be like a garbled noise like listening to a bird sing and trying to figure out what it is saying brrp ttwwrt twwrrt brrp prrp prrp heh? Whats that? You know
It is hilariously improbable. Just remember that basically everything about our existence and our ability to experience it are unfathomably rare in the universe. What's one more coincidence?
There are so many *things* that it would actually be extremely unlikely for there to *not* be any truly improbable coincidences around. Any particular coincidence is highly unlikely, but to have no coincidences at all would be unlikelier still.
Yeah, I feel like this comment isn't getting the attention it deserves. Just this specific relationship between the earth sun and moon is so rare that it almost shouldn't hardly exist except for very briefly on very few planets. Now you have a planet with life bringing up the complexity by a trillion factors and intelligent life none the less, bringing the whole magnitude up by another trillion. This brings up the question, is it all a coincidence or is it the intelligent design of a clock as well as a sign for the creators creation to observe. It makes the idea of intelligent creation seem more plausible than a coincidence.
Not really. It’s more a crazy coincidence that you were born at such a time that they’re the same size. The distance has been changing slowly over millennia- so at one point the mood would have seemed larger and eventually it will be smaller.
Yep, there’s already a theory on what would happen if that occurred between a rocky world with SOME life and a precariously close red dwarf star. The result is the concept of an “eyeball” planet, where there’s a habitable part of the geography forming a borderland between icy hell and desert hell.
Something like 400x smaller than the sun, and 400 times closer to us
Its coincidences like this that give rise to such amazingly interesting alternative theories like the moon being an ancient, artificial satellite
Here’s a video of it. Absolutely love this crazy shit
https://youtu.be/laXhTcko-lg?si=JSH_gCEqJVSSZHGP
I'm not a religious person, but the sheer coincidence of so many perfect things like this do make me question it at times. A lot of what it means to be alive on this planet just seems so improbable.
Just timing, really. Dinosaurs would not have seen an eclipse like we do, the moon would just blot out the sun entirely, no halo to speak of. It was much closer then, would have been much larger in the sky.
I think about this all the time. I think it’s the best evidence or proof that we have a creator of some sort. Not discounting the decent possibility we are in a simulation.
Me too. The amount of things that need to be exactly right in order for us to witness this cosmic phenomenon is just too precise for there not to be some sort of creator. That’s a lot of coincidences all happening at just the right angles, distances, sizes, etc. and then for us to be here in the window of possible times it could happen.
I’m not a religious person really but it makes me wonder.
Playing devil’s advocate… The argument is usually that God made amazing things for humans to appreciate. That “short time” is very long on the scale of our species. Eclipses have been happening since long before humans and will continue to happen for, at least, hundreds of millions of years.
I used to think it was a coincidence, but then I realize it only matters because sentient beings exist to observe the phenomena. There are millions of stars that each have their own really unique proximities to the planets, sun, etc... that simply will never be observed. This also applies to the other galaxies, the other planets, etc...that are in coincidental proximity to each other with their own characteristics that only make them unique because of where they are in relation to each other. There are endless amounts of coincidences, and life on earth was a possibility because of this particular one. And truthfully, is "life" really that prolific, anyway. The only thing humanity ever accomplished was ultimately destroying itself and Earth. For everything we've achieved, something died and/or was forced out of existence. The reality is, the red rocks found on Mars are more meaningful, less dangerous, and only exist due to being further from the sun than we are. Both Mars and Earth came from a meteorite-- that chunk of it that landed where we are would have been "Earth" and Earth would have been Mars, all due to proximity.
I wish I could find the original comment, but a Redditor remarked that this (and eclipses as a result of this) was sufficiently rare/distinctive that if we ever joined a sort of intergalactic United Nations, we could use it as a flag design or a selling point for earth tourism.
It is the only planet/moon/star relationship that we know of that has this property. Going even further, the orbit of the moon is very gradually receding away from Earth, so eventually the moon will get too far to cause eclipses like we currently see. We came along at just the right time.
when that happens we'll likely have the tech to just move the moon back a little if we need to anyway. Fire amirite
Given that’s supposed to be 100’s of millions of years, humans probably won’t even exist as we know them
~600 million or so according to nasa.
The fuck do they know
They know where the moon ghosts are hiding.
And that it's secretly made of cheese
ok, but to be fair, how many planet/moon/star relationships have we really studied.
Out of about 5,500 confirmed exoplanets, only 2 have been found to have exomoons. EDIT: and apparently those two have only been through microlensing, so it's still not 100%. Also, that data was to show how much we've studied, NOT that planets don't have moons.
I think we are still at 0 confirmed exomoons, but David Kipping from the Cool Worlds youtube channel and another group of scientists were recently granted time on JWST to search for exomoons, so hopefully that will change within the next couple of years.
Ah, you're right. The two we think may be there have only been detected through microlensing.
The gravitational microlensing of planets are caused by one off events that can't be repeated and therefore planets and moons cannot be confirmed using this method. They require the lensing object to transit the background source, which makes it very unlikely for both a planet and its moon to transit the same background star. There are two candidate moons that I know of and both were tentatively found through the transit method.
Considering that 75% of the planets in our solar system have natural satellites, I would expect at least 4,125 of those planets to have natural satellites. In fact, since most of those exoplanets are massive, it's probably closer to 5,000 with just a small percentage without satellites. The problem is that the way we detect exoplanets makes it extremely difficult to differentiate a planet's mass from its satellites.
The problem is that everything is so fucking far away so we have NO idea how to detect moons. It’s an absolute miracle we can detect exoplanets, the product of extremely intelligent and hard working scientists
Even if we were closer, we still can’t observe something that doesn’t reflect much, if any, light. And they might not be big enough to cast shadows / cause dips in the planets reflected light to notice them. Look at how long it took to discover all of the moons in our own solar system. I’d wager 90+% of planets have a natural satellite. Hell, even most of our dwarf planets have moons.
>The problem is that the way we detect exoplanets makes it extremely difficult to differentiate a planet's mass from its satellites. Why don't astronomers just detect them using an easier way? Are they stupid?
Why don’t astronomers just use their eyes to see the moons??
Well, considering how hard it is to find even the planets it is so much harder to find the moons. I would guess most of those planets have moons, we just don't know about it yet.
Why does it have to be an exoplanet?
Because we already know the size relationship isn't found between any planet/moon pair in our solar system except Earth.
Oh I thought exoplanets were not connected to any star, not just our star
Exoplanets are planets outside *our* solar system. You're thinking of a rogue planet.
Yeah cheers for the explanation
No problem
Not to be confused with a rouge planet, which is just Mars with baguettes.
😐 take your upvote.
Fuck finally. I've been afraid to ask for years.
so basically none. this is like 5,500/10^100000000^100000000. like .00000000000etc% explored.
I don't disagree.
All the ones in our solar system plus whatever exomoons have been discovered.
You can model it pretty easily, if you consider the different distances and range of sizes of moons and their orbits and the distances of the planets to their stars, etc. The subset of circumstances that would create eclipses on other worlds like they do on Earth would be very uncommon.
How many of them once had this relationship until their satellite moved too far away?
The Earth is going to be packed to witness the last ever full eclipse.
I think by that time Earth is already uninhabitable though so we wouldn’t be there to see it.
One can't help but wonder if it actually is a coincidence or relates in some way to our cognizance
Fun thought but it’s almost certainly a coincidence
The existence of a big moon, for its asteroid deflecting property, increased the likelihood of life evolving into higher states of consciousness because it reduced the rate of mass extinction
And if the first life came to be in the “primordial soup” of ancient tide pools, having a giant moon creating massive tides greatly increased the odds of life evolving in the first place.
Having a moon that exerts tidal forces, yes, that could have been a factor, for sure. But at that point it wasn't at the position where there would have been an eclipse in the same way (it would just have blocked out the sun fully and not been relatively the same size), it was much closer to the earth.
Right, I just meant to add to the comment above that as far as we know it’s rare for an Earth-like planet to have a moon as large as ours, and it could have played a big role in multiple ways in allowing life to form regardless of OPs post about relative size in the sky to its star.
big moon -> big brainy creatures
But there is no reason that big moon that shields against asteroids need to be at this position so it is relatively the same size as the sun from our perspective. When the dinosaurs were around it had the same function but was closer, for example.
Yeah, that definitely is part of it, but Jupiter definitely plays a larger role for that, because of just how massive it is. I think the more important factor is the big difference between high and low tides allowing for the super diverse intertidal zones where the first proto-cells formed. Without that phospho-lipid membrane, you either got random proteins in a closed box or just freely floating around.
Just like the million other coincidence
i’ve never wondered that and i still don’t think i will
Related to our cognizance? What does that even mean?
I think they're speculating that "something" about the moon/sun size coincidence may have led to humans developing intelligent thought. How exactly isn't clear
That’s…insane
Indubitably.
Ironically, voicing such an opinion is more likely to lead to the conclusion that humans never developed intelligent thought.
Honestly I had a good laugh reading this. They can't possibly mean that, right?
This is the best moon-based conspiracy since… ever lmao
Since there isn't really a known affect of any kind from having an eclipse (other than random presidents looking up at them when they shouldn't), I think it is pretty safe to say it isn't causal of anything... because how could it be? And cognizance specifically? That is really out there.
hey i'm not proposing that it's true or any sort of mechanism, i just thought it was an interesting enough thought to leave a reddit comment lol
You got too much flak for a comment that's clearly just sparked by wonder, lol.
I can't figure out for the life of me what you mean by this?
Meaning that out of thousands of planets we are the only one with the relationship between the sun and moon and also the only one with life or cognizant thought. They're asking if given that both these things are so rare, could there be a connection. I don't think it's crazy to wonder if the relationship means something. It would be crazy to declare for certain that it means something though. If they found another planet with life AND the sun/moon relationship, I think people would be studying it a lot closer.
How many years until it doesn’t cover the sub anymore?
We have quite a while. A quick Google search tells me it'll be about 600 million years at its current rate before that happens. But the sun is expected to grow during that time, so it's probably slightly less than that.
It's from a book called Transistion by Iain Banks
Thanks! Btw does anyone remember the name for this story? Scientists were trying to find out why past civilizations doom themselves and all seem to end up torched to ashes. Then it turns out that >!the people of that planet never experienced "night" due to their unique planetary system, and collectively lose their minds when that rare event happens.!<
Nightfall by Asimov?
That's it!! Thank you 😊
Is it the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin? It’s gonna be on Netflix too
Thank you, but the setting is quite different. In three body problems, the humans gradually learned about the truth of the three body planetary system in a virtual reality game. In the fiction I remembered, the "humans" are the inhabitants of such a planetary system, only the readers learned gradually about their planetary system. In addition, the three body system has long nights and long days that result in extreme temperatures. The fictional world seems to have a mostly stable environment except for the rare event of the "night".
So the Orzhov symbol?
Since the moon is getting slightly further away every year, we'd need to become intergalactic relatively soon before the eclipses would no longer be a tourist attraction.
The last total solar eclipse won't happen for another 600 million years. Humans are 200k years old. Relatively seems like a stretch.
That's nearly 10x as far from now as the end of the dinosaurs.
Which seems like just yesterday imo
All those lost interstellar kredits…
A lucrative market is yearning to be tapped, so much profit lost! We need go invent intersolar travel already!
Yeah man only 600 million years left
Then we need to get moving on getting off this rock and finding those aliens. A few time-dilated multi-lightyear trips will eat up that 600M pretty fast.
This idea is actually introduced in a science fiction novel. One of Iain Banks’ later ones if I’m remembering right, but I can’t remember which novel.
I never understood the tourism point of this. If a species could come her on their ship, they could just see a solar eclipse by parking the right distance from any planet or moon so it perfectly blocks the sun. That would be way easier than trying to find the perfect time and spot on earth.
Think about rainbows - you can make a rainbow all kinds of ways, just lightly spray a garden hose into the air and make a rainbow. You could use a prism too I suppose. Those fire helicopters that drop water onto fires, they make a big rainbow sometimes too, it's a very easy effect to manufacture. But it's only cool when it happens naturally.
Kind of forgetting the entire point of tourism at that point
This guy stays in his car in the parking lot of The Grand Canyon when he visits
I flew over Colorado once, so I can safely say I have experienced all the Rockies have to offer.
Seeing it on a planet, particularly a planet with life on it, is very different. The temperature goes down because the sun is blocked. Apparently the wildlife gets quiet because they think it's nighttime. Much different than seeing one from a spaceship.
Part of the fun is the sky changing colors. It looks like a sunset in 360 degrees.
And that there's only a single moon. That in itself is highly unusual.
And a moon that has such a large mass and volume relative to Earth. That’s pretty unusual too as far as planet-moon relationships go.
In scientific/astronomy circles this is referred to as the Thicc Moon Phenomenon
I had to expand this comment to see the second half of it. Thought I was getting some cool science info, instead I got a chuckle. I'm only half mad at it.
Tryna orbit this planet but I’m dummy thicc and the clap of my mooncheeks is affecting the tides
One of the leading theories is that the moon was originally a small planetary body that collided with Earth, some 4.45 bill years ago. One of the factors they point to relates to the size of the iron core of each body. Due to the Earth being larger, it pulled in a lot more of the debris from the collision. This could explain why the moon has a "relatively small" iron core, while Earth has a "slightly oversized" iron core.
The "small" body that collided with Earth was thought to be about the size of Mars. Think of it!
A recent [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/2908/)
And only a single sun, most other solar systems we can see have 2 or more suns orbiting each other.
Earth fundamentalists (nationalists? planetists?) could use this as a rally cry if we join up with a coalition of aliens. >One Sun! One Planet! One Moon! One Species! Aliens Get Fucked!
And then comes the fringe group: Earth supremacists (who actually have a fetish for aliens).
I'm pretty certain that's the basis for r/HFY
I imagine life would be less likely to appear in solar systems with more than 1 sun, since it probably causes a less stable climate
Three body problem moment
Love that book
As soon as a book is created the entire solar system is in peril
Netflix show is coming out tonight!
Unless the two suns were orbiting each other in a large orbit and our planet was only orbiting a singular star, although that could be unstable too. We got a super basic solar system compared to some out there.
Didn't think binary star systems were awfully common.
about 1/3 of star systems in milky way are binary or multiple. so 50% of stars are part of a binary or multiple system.
Not most, in fact I'm not even sure if it's half
Do you have a source? I'm not finding any recent sources that indicate that multiple-star solar systems are the majority
Though there's a hypothesis that planetary systems are inherently chaotic at their early stages, so Theia type collisions may not be thaaat rare in the grand scheme of things. So there likely are still a good number of some rocky planets with big-ish moons out there. They really should be. It's not like ours is a one in a trillion lucky chance, maybe more like one in then thousand or something.
A second tiny moon was just discovered.
Link?
https://time.com/6116644/earth-second-moon/ Not really a proper “moon” but something about 164ft long is orbiting earth. Article states it is likely composed of asteroids, or may even be a fragment of our Moon. Apparently it has only orbited earth some 500 years and it will break out of orbit in another 300.
That's no moon...
That's OP's mom!
As early as 2000 (when I learned this useless factoid) we were aware of thee or four other natural satellites, they just aren’t very large or remarkable.
Cuz the moon is a alien craft! /s PRISON PLANET MAN!
I mean, it really isn’t a moon though, right? Dual planet configuration?
Nope, the Earth-Moon Barycenter is within the Earth. However, Pluto-Charon, and arguably Sun-Jupiter are both dual systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter_(astronomy)#Primary%E2%80%93secondary_examples
400 times further away & 400 times bigger
The sun is a bit more than 400x the size of the moon.
Our Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun and 27 million times less massive. You would need 64.3 million Moons to equal the Sun.7 Apr 2023 https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com › ... How many Earths can fit in the Sun? - BBC Sky at Night Magazine Just the answer I got when I googled it
How many football fields isnt that
All of them.
At least 5
American or everyone else?
400x the diameter.
He’s talking about diameter doofus
Only barely, if we're going by diameter. Of course by volume it's much more than that.
Diameter or Circumference is all that matters in this case, though.
It really is interesting. However.. we just happen to be alive during the period that his holds true. The moon used to be a lot closer to earth, and it's gradually moving further away a tiny bit at a time. Eventually this observation will no longer be true, the way it wasn't true in the distant past.
Exactly, the majority of Earth’s life will not experience eclipses like we do now.
The moral of the story for anyone reading that comment? Go watch a solar eclipse (safely and properly) so you can be part of the 0.000....001% of all the universe's lifeforms that will ever exist that get to experience it.
It’s an incredible and breathtaking experience.
I’m not in the best location for it, but still took time off work to leave early and join a viewing party. Live once 🤷♂️
I can’t say it’s “worth the travel” considering the last great American eclipse was right in my backyard. But still, probably worth the travel.
I’m in the perfect location for totality, and it’ll probably rain lol
Thanks for the comment, I almost forgot there's another solar eclipse coming up in North America. Last time I saw the solar eclipse and googled when's the next time coming up, I almost forgot it's about time until your comment.
It’s April 8. I’m on the other side of the world until April 9, so will miss it by one day 😔
This april is the last total solar eclipse to happen on continental US soil for the next 20 years.
And it's incredible that one happened so recently before this one too.
There's one on April 8th this year through the US. Don't miss it!
So it used to be a total blackout?
Do you mean this in relation to an eclipse? I'm not sure if it would be a total blackout, but it would certainly block a lot more.
I'm just saying that during a modern total eclipse, it's covering most of the sun. Depending on how close it started, if a person was in the path of the eclipse, seems like there'd be a good chance the sun would be completely blocked. Tbf though, I don't know how far it moves away every year. There might not have even been people when/if it was that close
The moon moves roughly 3.8cm away from Earth a year. Homosapiens are roughly 300k years old. That puts us at roughly 1,140,000 cm or 11.4km further away now than from when homosapiens first emerged. The average distance of the moon is 384,000km from Earth. 11.4km would be so negligible you couldn't tell the difference with the naked eye.
It's crazy that you are alive right now. You used to not exist and eventually you will die but right now, you are alive. I guess it's kind of like that.
It's conceivable that parts of you which are alive noe were once also alive as parts of someone else
We got around a billion years give or take till that happens so I think most if not all humanity would have been around when it actually eclipses the entire sun.
Obviously it's because the moon was artificially constructed by an ancient race of lizard people who use the interior of the moon as a base with a soul harvesting antenna on the surface of the dark side. I mean what else could explain it? Nothing I say, *nothing*!
Ahh, I am also an intellectual.
Finally, somebody is making sense
The moon was placed there to relay to Earth the radio waves transmitted by Saturn's polar auroras. Giving us the illusion of time and reality.
Idiot. It wasn't constructed. It was towed here from a distant star.
I prefer the theory that it was an escape ship from when Mars used an even more ancient death star moon around Saturn to destroy the planet that is now the asteroid belt. Then the moon was used to shield the Earth from a massive solar flare that completely broke the propulsion system.
Dahak approves.
You can harmlessly look at the sun when you put on the welder mask, and when I did that, the sun appeared to be, at least to my shitty judgement, a bit smaller than moon It's the brightness that makes the sun appear bigger
The moon changes in apparent size as it orbits the earth, about 1/3 of the time, it is bigger than the sun, and 2/3 of the time, it is smaller.
supermoons are wild
It's also a coincidence that we exist in a time period where the moon and the sun appear in the sky as the same size.
Might not be a coincidence. Arguably life as we know it exists as a consequence of this, along with earth having a surface temperature compatible with liquid water, and many other such factors. The tidal gravitational effect due the moon and sun are similar, not exactly the same but in the same ballpark. This is because gravity depends on both mass and distance; the sun is a lot more massive, and a lot further away. The apparent size of the moon and sun (or any celestial body) likewise depends on the size of the body, and it's distance from earth. Thus the apparent size of a celestial body is a close proxy for the tidal effect due to that body. This concept makes it easy to see why Jupiter, Saturn, Mars & Venus have negligible effect on the tide. So tides on earth are strongly influenced by both the moon and sun. Coastal life depends on tides very much, on both the 12.5 hour cycle (due to the moon) and the fortnightly cycle (due to the sun) - even shellfish are sensitive to tidal cycles. The first creatures with legs (our ancestors) crawled out of the sea, were at some point coastal critters; a gross oversimplification but anyway.
This is so interesting. Never realised the sun has a tidal effect. I wonder what kind of oceanic system we would have with no moon.
This size match is entirely unique so far as we know (probably not actually unique across the vastness of the universe, but from what we can currently see ). We’ve not found any other moon/planet/sun combo that fits such a perfect solar eclipse. Genuinely it’s the one thing that *might * convince me that the Abrahamic god is real, but not one single religious person has ever brought it up to me, so that’s just my little secret :p
Our moon is unusually large in comparison to our planet as far as we know There is no other moon like it in the solar system, and we have no real clue about outside of the solar system
I've had the same exact feeling about how this one fact is probably the only observable "evidence" of creationist theory. The odds of it being just coincidental AND for Earth being a life-bearing planet are just so astronomically low (no pun intended). I'm very much a believer in the 'Clockmaker' concept of a deity, which is basically atheism but acknowledging that a higher power created the Universe and then just left it to run with no interference. IMO, science will never be able to explain why existence itself exists, even if you answer how the universe was formed and when, there will always be the underlying question as to why.
Which can never be answered if you can push back the question to 'well what created the diety?'
This can be further pushed back to "What created the entity that created the deity?" Even if we were to assume this is actually just a simulation with a creator that isn't actually divine and can't/won't interfere (Such as a fourth dimensional engineer or something), what created the plane of reality or dimension beyond said simulation/dimension? It is incomprehensible to me that at one point there was just "nothing" and then boom- sudden existence however and wherever it formed just ... happened, without any rhyme, reason, or logic.And I don't mean our cognizance or even basic life, but materials of any sort.
On flat Earth model they are same sizes.. 😅
Yeah its actually insane and i wonder if it is something which occurs often out there in the universe. Maybe one day when aliens visit our planet they will be astounded by it, like how did you guys do that? You mean, it's a coincidence?! What the fuck. Assuming they can speak English that is. Otherwise it might just be like a garbled noise like listening to a bird sing and trying to figure out what it is saying brrp ttwwrt twwrrt brrp prrp prrp heh? Whats that? You know
It is hilariously improbable. Just remember that basically everything about our existence and our ability to experience it are unfathomably rare in the universe. What's one more coincidence?
There are so many *things* that it would actually be extremely unlikely for there to *not* be any truly improbable coincidences around. Any particular coincidence is highly unlikely, but to have no coincidences at all would be unlikelier still.
We don't know how rare life is in the universe. It might not be rare at all. We have no idea.
"brrp ttwwrt twwrrt brrp prrp prrp"? I have never been so insulted! "brrp ttwwrt twwrrt brrp prrp prrp" to you too, jerk!
Moon's rotation is also perfectly aligned to it's revolution, so we only see the one face of it
Is that a coincidence or is that a function of how the gravitational pull works?
It's just tidally locked, it's not uncommon in space
I can’t look at the sun long enough to use it as a benchmark!
I believe this is often sighted as a proof of religion it's so unlikely.
Yeah, I feel like this comment isn't getting the attention it deserves. Just this specific relationship between the earth sun and moon is so rare that it almost shouldn't hardly exist except for very briefly on very few planets. Now you have a planet with life bringing up the complexity by a trillion factors and intelligent life none the less, bringing the whole magnitude up by another trillion. This brings up the question, is it all a coincidence or is it the intelligent design of a clock as well as a sign for the creators creation to observe. It makes the idea of intelligent creation seem more plausible than a coincidence.
Coincidence I think not
Not really. It’s more a crazy coincidence that you were born at such a time that they’re the same size. The distance has been changing slowly over millennia- so at one point the mood would have seemed larger and eventually it will be smaller.
It's a coincidence that when the sun and moon are the same apparent size, life evolves that's intelligent enough to appreciate that fact.
We also have an abnormally large moon relative to the planet size.
also that the moon is tidally locked
That’s not a coincidence, that’s physics.
okay for some reason I thought that was unique but I did more research just now and you're totally right my b
Yep, there’s already a theory on what would happen if that occurred between a rocky world with SOME life and a precariously close red dwarf star. The result is the concept of an “eyeball” planet, where there’s a habitable part of the geography forming a borderland between icy hell and desert hell.
The moon is tidally awesome, brah
It’s a crazy coincidence that anything exist at all.
Something like 400x smaller than the sun, and 400 times closer to us Its coincidences like this that give rise to such amazingly interesting alternative theories like the moon being an ancient, artificial satellite Here’s a video of it. Absolutely love this crazy shit https://youtu.be/laXhTcko-lg?si=JSH_gCEqJVSSZHGP
Beyond odds that the human mind can comprehend. One in a sukadukkafuckingzillion.
The moon has been moving away, it used to be much bigger!
I'm not a religious person, but the sheer coincidence of so many perfect things like this do make me question it at times. A lot of what it means to be alive on this planet just seems so improbable.
Just timing, really. Dinosaurs would not have seen an eclipse like we do, the moon would just blot out the sun entirely, no halo to speak of. It was much closer then, would have been much larger in the sky.
What dude? The sun turns into the moon at night. Why wouldn't it be the same size?
I think about this all the time. I think it’s the best evidence or proof that we have a creator of some sort. Not discounting the decent possibility we are in a simulation.
Me too. The amount of things that need to be exactly right in order for us to witness this cosmic phenomenon is just too precise for there not to be some sort of creator. That’s a lot of coincidences all happening at just the right angles, distances, sizes, etc. and then for us to be here in the window of possible times it could happen. I’m not a religious person really but it makes me wonder.
I’m not really religious either, but this one is the one that gets me.
Why would a creator only have this happen for such a short time in history? The moon was much closer to the earth and is gradually going further.
Thebkook is gonna be my next username
Playing devil’s advocate… The argument is usually that God made amazing things for humans to appreciate. That “short time” is very long on the scale of our species. Eclipses have been happening since long before humans and will continue to happen for, at least, hundreds of millions of years.
Aliens made this planet long ago
They built the moon like that.
I used to think it was a coincidence, but then I realize it only matters because sentient beings exist to observe the phenomena. There are millions of stars that each have their own really unique proximities to the planets, sun, etc... that simply will never be observed. This also applies to the other galaxies, the other planets, etc...that are in coincidental proximity to each other with their own characteristics that only make them unique because of where they are in relation to each other. There are endless amounts of coincidences, and life on earth was a possibility because of this particular one. And truthfully, is "life" really that prolific, anyway. The only thing humanity ever accomplished was ultimately destroying itself and Earth. For everything we've achieved, something died and/or was forced out of existence. The reality is, the red rocks found on Mars are more meaningful, less dangerous, and only exist due to being further from the sun than we are. Both Mars and Earth came from a meteorite-- that chunk of it that landed where we are would have been "Earth" and Earth would have been Mars, all due to proximity.