The End - The Perfect Fit

[Mortama]

It was a good read, plus im bored so posting it anyway.

Heres a link to the source for more stuff :D
http://www.newscientist.com/special/...n-solar-system

We live in uninteresting times. Since the ructions that created the planets in the solar system's first 100 million years and apart from an early migration of the giant planets and the odd colliding comet not swept safely aside by Jupiter - nothing much has really been happening. The planets circle like clockwork, the sun burns steadily, and even delicate life has survived on at least one world.

It cannot last. Something unpleasant is bound to shatter this comfortable calm.

Our sun will die, of course, about six billion years from now. But things could get ugly long before that. The steady gyrations of the solar system today may conceal the seeds of chaos. Even the tiniest of irregularities can build up over time, gradually altering the paths of the planets. Between now and final sundown, it has been calculated, there is a roughly 2 per cent chance of catastrophe. Mars might drift too close to Jupiter and be thrown out of the solar system. If we're very unlucky, hot-headed Mercury could run wild and smash into Earth.

Meanwhile, the sun will slowly get brighter. Within 2 billion years, its heat will probably kill off life on Earth's surface. Mars, on the other hand - if it is still there - should gain a cosier climate. Even if it is dead today, it could one day come to life.

But again, not forever. When the sun's core burns up the last of its hydrogen fuel, the whole structure of the star will radically rearrange. It will slowly bloat to more than a million times its present volume, becoming a red giant. That giant will swallow Mercury and Venus and, according to the latest simulations, probably Earth too.

Baked by the sky-filling sun, and stained redder than ever, Mars will now definitively be dead. The icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter might in turn become hospitable. Saturn's giant moon Titan is particularly promising, as it already holds a rich soup of organic molecules. The red giant's heat could leave once-icy Titan with a global bath of water and ammonia where those organic molecules could form life.

Any creatures that bob to the surface of these outer moons would look up at a rather different sky. By that time, the Milky Way will probably have collided with our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda to form a unified "Milkomeda", where violent bursts of star formation - the nurseries of a new generation of solar systems - will light up the heavens for a time.

Any late flowering of life in our solar system, if it happens at all, will not last long. After its brief escapade as a red giant, the sun's inner furnace will finally fail, and it will cast off its outer layers and shrink into a tiny white dwarf. The briefly balmy Titan will freeze over once more. Its host planet Saturn, together with the other denizens of the outer solar system, will orbit on for tens of billions of years more, until treachery from within or marauders from without do for them, too. Jupiter or Saturn could eject their lighter comrades, Uranus and Neptune, or passing stars could strip away any planet, even massive Jupiter.

The future is never certain, though, and alternative endings can be written. There is a slim chance that the whole solar system, sun and all, might be thrown out of Milkomeda intact. Out in the emptiness of intergalactic space, the planets would be safe from marauders. There they could continue to circle our darkening star until their energy is eventually sapped and they spiral inwards. One by one as they hit the black-dwarf sun, a few final flares will rage against the dying of the light.

And another Fun read at least for me anyway lol.

It is one of the most glorious pieces of natural theatre. Assuming you spend your life on the same part of the Earth's surface, you might witness it once - if you are particularly lucky or very long-lived, perhaps twice. But a total solar eclipse is worth the wait. At the height of totality, the fit of sun and moon is so perfect that beads of sunlight can only penetrate to us through the rugged valleys on the lunar surface, creating the stunning "diamond ring" effect.

It is all thanks to a striking coincidence. The sun is about 400 times as wide as the moon, but it is also 400 times further away. The two therefore look the same size in the sky - a unique situation among our solar system's eight planets and 166 known moons. Earth is also the only planet to harbour life. Pure coincidence?

Almost undoubtedly, say most astronomers. But perhaps it is not so much of one as the bare numbers suggest. Our moon is different. The many moons of the large outer planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are thought to have originated through one of two processes: from the accretion of a disc of material in the planet's gravity field, in a miniature version of the formation of the solar system's planets, or through the later gravitational capture of passing small bodies. The second possibility is also thought to account for Mars's two small satellites, Deimos and Phobos, the only other moons in the inner solar system.

But our moon is simply too big relative to Earth's own size to have formed easily by either of these processes. Planetary scientists believe there can be only one explanation: in the first 100 million years of the solar system, when unattached debris was still zinging around the inner solar system, a Mars-sized object smashed into Earth. That impact radically remodelled our planet, expelling a huge amount of debris that eventually congealed into our oversized moon.

And here's the best bit. Such a big moon is a big boon for life on Earth. As Earth spins on its own axis, it has a natural tendency to wobble, owing to the varying pull on it from other bodies such as the sun. The unseen hand of the moon's gravity gently damps that wobble, preventing rotational instabilities which would otherwise have caused dramatic changes in Earth's climatic zones over time. Such instabilities would have made it much more tricky for life to get started on our planet.

Earth's position in the "habitable zone" around the sun where liquid water is abundant is undoubtedly the single most important factor in its fecundity. But the presence of a large moon - one large enough to cause total eclipses - might also have been crucial. If so, that has important consequences for the search for life on other planets.

Since the impact that created it, the moon has been moving steadily away from us, currently about 3.8 centimetres per year. The dinosaurs did not see eclipses like we do: the moon was too close 200 million years ago, more than big enough in the sky to block out the entire sun. Equally, any occupants of Earth in a couple of hundred million years' time will not see total eclipses at all, as the moon will appear too small.

Our luck seems the result of two coincident timescales: that of the recession of an impact-formed moon, and that for the evolution of intelligent life. If you should be fortunate enough to experience a total eclipse in your lifetime, consider this intriguing possibility: that large moon might be the reason you are there.

[baralai80]

I ain't reading all that nigga. give me a short summary to catch my eyes.

[Mortama]

Its hard to summarize really. Life, Destruction the usual natural cycle of Things. 0_o

[Howard Roark]

some context would be nice, are these complete articles? links to sources are helpful in cases like this. simply copypasting some [to you] interesting tidbit from somewhere sometime isn't the most reader-friendly way to start a thread, as the intial hi-larious response indicated:\

[Mortama]

Very True sorry about that heres a link to the source.
Our Unknown Solar System - New Scientist

They are complete articles as well I just found it a good read thats all :D





Each to there own I guess.

[Brien]

Interesting reads really like the first article. its just sad none of us will see any of it. Thats why we play eve and mmos i guess .