My god... it's full of stars!

Um, two questions.

One, why is the Solar System smaller than the sun itself?

(Pane # 5)

Question two.

How do they know how big the stars are?

Just looking at them only works if you know how far away they are.

How do we know how far away they are?

I only know of Two ways of finding distence.

1. Use a ruller

This doesn't work, becouse I don't know of a ruler that big

2. Bounce something off of it (usually a laser)

This doesn't work, becouse they are too far away for any object to return in any timly fashion.

Pretty damn massive.  Wonder if it'll ever be possible to visit places that far..

I would be very surprised if no other inteligent life exists.

Tesla, we can actually send lasers out REALLY REALLY REALLY far in space but thats not how we measure stars. We can measure the distance of a star but comparing it's light to that of a supernova, and by knowing its distance we can figure out it's size.

There are some other ways too

Tesla: Look up "parallax," and when you've absorbed that look up "standard candles" and you'll have your answers.

I'M IMPORTANT

Screamed the speck of dust

I'm gonna need more Terror Stars.

The way I see it. The chance of an Earth like planet being created is pretty small. The chance of life forming on Earth was even smaller. The chance of us evolving into the humans we are now is even smaller than that.

But here we are, using our telescopes to explore the universe.

The universe is JUST SO DAMN BIG. We already know life happened once, there is no way it couldn't happen again.

The chances of something happening within a near-infinite universe are nearly 100%.  Something like %99.99999999999999999---

Saying there's no other life with the facts of the thing staring straight the hell at us is like standing in a hurricane screaming "BOY BAD WEATHER NEVER HAPPENS HERE WHAT WOULD I POSSIBLY NEED INSURANCE FOR!!??!!?1?12)

It's not. It's not showing the solar system to scale. It's a comparative size of all the planets against the sun.

The real terrifying part of VY Canis Majoris is that when hypergiant stars die, they send out a intense Gamma ray stream that boils everything in its path.  Since its 5000 light yeara away, the stream will still be strong enough to kill everything on this planet.

They measure the radiation using a interfernometer and occultation.

There are multiple ways of measuring size and distance. I think three are commonly used. In order of increasing distance:

1. 2 points far away (on opposite sides of earth) measure the angle

2. Can't quite remember this one unfortunately...

3. Redshift from the universe's expansion

My Ego is bigger.

The ods of there being intelligent life in the universe other than our own are indeed close to 100%. The only question that truly remains is one of communication and discovery. FTL communication will be required to reduce the time between exchanged conversation below a generation or two (or much more for our further neighbours).

I say hi, my son lives when they hear it and my grandson gets to hear their reply (and try to decipher it). They're out there, but they're not reachable without significant advancement in out technological level.

As to calculating distance of stars, The paralax method is used to calculate the distance out to roughly 1000 LY. beyond that there are several methods.

Stellar motions: All stars are in motion, but only for nearby stars are these motions perceivable. Statistically, therefore, the stars that have larger motions are nearer. By measuring the motions of a large number of stars, we can estimate their average distance from their average motion.

Moving clusters: Clusters of stars travel together, such as the Pleiades or Hyades star clusters. Analyzing the apparent motion of the cluster can give us the distance to it.

Inverse-square law: The apparent brightness of a star depends both on its intrinsic brightness (its luminosity, or how bright it really is) and its distance from us. If we know the luminosity of a star (for instance, we have a measured parallax for one star of the same type and know that others of the same type will have similar luminosities), we can measure its apparent brightness (also called its apparent magnitude) and work out the distance using the inverse-square law. There are several variations on this, many of which are used to measure distances to stars in other galaxies.

Interstellar lines: The space between stars is not empty, but contains a sparse distribution of gas. Some times this leaves absorption lines in the spectrum we observe from stars beyond the interstellar gas. The further a star is, the more absorption will be observed since the light has passed through more of the interstellar medium.

Period-luminosity relation: Some stars are regular pulsators. The physics of their pulsations is such that the period of one oscillation is related to the luminosity of the star. If we measure the period of such a star, we calculate its luminosity. From this, and its apparent magnitude, we can calculate the distance.

I pulled that off of http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970415c.html