Space!

[pyat]

When I was a kid, outer space was chock full of stuff. It was like Flash Gordon or The Little Prince - new moons and asteroids every few miles. When I got older, the size and scope and emptiness of the solar system was impressed upon me. All that "If Earth was a peanut in Ottawa, then Jupiter would be a volley ball at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and Pluto would be a mustard seed floating in a glass of water at the South Pole of the Moon," stuff.

But as time goes by, the solar system seems to be filling up again:

Green = Kuiper belt object
Orange = Scattered disc object or Centaur
Pink = Trojan asteroids trailing Jupiter
Yellow = Trojan asteroids trailing Neptune

The Asteroid Belt, moons, and rocky planets aren't even listed. And this is just the known list of objects in these categories. There are expected to be more than 70,000 Kuiper Belt Objects, many of them planet-sized. The inner bodies are mostly rocky objects with lots of heavy minerals. Further out, they're treasure troves of frozen chemicals - even water ice.

Also, as a kid I remember being perplexed by the weird fish-eye perspective of the Soviet Venera probe panoramas from the surface of Venus. Modern image processing has converted these distended photos into more comprehensible subjective views...


Yes, it's Venus! And, like every other planet we've landed on, it looks a lot like Sudbury in the 1970s!

Comments

[waiwode.livejournal.com]

You could add one million planet sized Kuiper Belt Objects and space would still be vast, empty, and lonely, like Hwy 407 before dawn on Sunday.

I mean, that diagram is over 24,000,000,000 km across!

Still, here's something pretty wild: At out past 105AU, Veeger Voyager I is no longer on that map!

Doug.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Oh, fer sure. But in some spots, the saturation is to the point where a space traveler could visit a new destination every couple of days.

And hey, Voyager is still operating!

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

And hey, Voyager is still operating!

It must return someday to interface with the Kirk Unit.

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but first it has to get back from the Delta Quadrant.