The other planets in the solar system POLL

?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b0DMoPLIys

http://cimg.carsforsale.com/569434/7bb5c4a8-0fa9-4ac2-bb22-7b85427b5001.jpg

agreed that mars is the most overrated

i want to say that mercury is the most underrated, but i'm not sure. a lot of that is dependent on my idea of how fucking MONSTROUS the sunrise must be there. also, the rotation of mercury is very strange - its years are 88 earth days, but it completes a rotation every 176 earth days. that creates some really strange things with sunrises:

At some places on Mercury’s surface, an observer could see the Sun rise about halfway, reverse its course, then set, all over the course of one Mercurial day. This happens about four days prior to perihelion, because Mercury’s angular orbital velocity is equal to its angular rotational velocity. This causes the apparent motion of the Sun to stop. Once Mercury achieves perihelion, its angular orbital velocity exceeds the angular rotational velocity and the Sun begins to move in reverse.

i tried to search for artist renderings of sunrises on mercury but found nothing. but in my mind it's completely amazing, because it's a combo of it taking so LONG and the sun being so enormous. i feel like that magic moment when the sun first barely emerges over the horizon would be magnified 1000x on mercury

uh, that second paragraph is not a quote from universetoday.com, just in case you couldn't tell

Haha, I liked the shift in tone there for a moment.

the idea that extraterrestrial planets can be overrated is very o_O to me

tsrobodo, that, and:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf3iWc6krj8&feature=kp

although I suppose pluto is overrated itt xp

Oh, did https non-embedding thing - it was 'Fred Vom Jupiter', anyway.
xp

The thing about Jupiter is that one of its satellites (Io) is as interesting and beautiful as any planet, another may harbor liquid water oceans (Europa), and there are two more big moons, at least 63 small ones, and a ring system too.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/jupiter/gal_io2_47971.jpg
Io, not visibly exploding at the moment.

God, I love Io.

lol it looks like a moldy cheese ball

"Impact craters on the surface of Venus (image reconstructed from radar data)"

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Mgn_p39146.png/758px-Mgn_p39146.png

"Maat Mons is a massive shield volcano. It is the second-highest mountain, and the highest volcano, on the planet Venus. It rises 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) above the mean planetary radius at 0.5°N 194.6°E, and nearly 5 km above the surrounding plains.[2] It is named after the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice, Ma'at."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maat_Mons_on_Venus.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Maat_Mons_on_Venus.jpg

Actual images from the surface of Venus via Venera 13.

http://www.space.com/images/i/000/023/793/original/venera13-venus.jpg

These are extrasolar planets but in my astronomy publishing day job one of my favorite things to read/hear about are HOT JUPITERS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter

band name

"Falling Off the Grid" iirc

This read makes me think of my Dad's oft-repeated mantra "I don't need to go overseas on holiday, there's enough here in Britain". Intergalactic travel - who needs it? So much to see right here at home. (Types "Ganymede" into airbnb...)

thread, not read

Venus from Venera 13 after the camera lens distortion is corrected.

http://lightsinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/c_venera_perspective.jpg

While looking at that photo, remember that Venus's surface temp is consistently 875/f. Ouch.

Any planet with "Helium Neon rain" should win this

Sanpaku otm. Also, there may be life in those Europan oceans

As a huge Kim Stanley Robinson fan I feel a lot of affection for Mars.

Mars can't compete with some of the other planets Wow! Fuck!! Ahhh!!! factors but it has a ghostly quality. It might have looked like a smaller earth when it was a warmer planet still holding water. That old Cosmos episode "Blues For a Red Planet" is a classic, even with the real footage from the rovers DeGrasse Tyson's version won't better it.

am tempted to vote jupiter.

venus is really fascinating too:

Venus is a terrestrial planet and is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet" because of their similar size, gravity, and bulk composition (Venus is both the closest planet to Earth and the planet closest in size to Earth). However, it has also been shown to be very different from Earth in other respects. It has the densest atmosphere of the four terrestrial planets, consisting of more than 96% carbon dioxide which absorbs over 95% of the incoming solar radiation. The atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 92 times that of Earth's. With a mean surface temperature of 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F), Venus has the hottest surface of any planet in the Solar System except for the surface of the solid core of Uranus. It has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor does it seem to have any organic life to absorb it in biomass. Venus is shrouded by an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light. Venus may have possessed oceans in the past,[13][14] but these would have vaporized as the temperature rose.[15] The water has most probably photodissociated, and, because of the lack of a planetary magnetic field, the free hydrogen has been swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind.[16] Venus's surface is a dry desertscape interspersed with slab-like rocks and periodically refreshed by volcanism.
from wikipedia

― marcos, Monday, March 31, 2014 4:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man reading that description of venus, someone please tell me there's some rad preachy scifi story about how venus, sister planet of earth, used to be populated by men long dead as the follies of their global warming by way of releasing ever more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without a care in the world made their planet hotter and hotter, leading to total destruction.

I think Sanpaku mentioned on the global warming thread that even we tried to bioengineer extreme runaway global warming on earth by simultaneously burning all the fossil fuels, releasing all the trapped methane hydrates etc earth would still be a teensy fraction as hot as infernal hothouse Venus.

A couple billions of years ago, as the Sun grew more luminous in its evolution through the main sequence, Venus was shrouded in a sweltering atmosphere of water vapor from evaporating oceans. Photodissociation of the water molecules in the upper atmosphere liberated hydrogen, occassionally with enough energy for escape velocity, over geological time leaving behind oxygen and its appetite for carbon. At hot enough temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide is more stable than crustal carbonates, so eventually nearly all of Venus's carbon became atmospheric. Earth has similar amounts of carbon, but thanks to our prevailing temperatures and the burial of diatom skeletons, algal blooms and peat, most is sequestered deep underground.

The sun continues to grow brighter, so the Earth has under a billion years left before its oceans evaporate and it experences a similar runaway greenhouse. Underground extremophile bacteria have perhaps 1.5 billion years left. In general, over the lifespan of any star the currently habitable zone moves outward. Earthlings were just lucky their goldilocks planet orbited a star large enough for a wide habitable zone, small enough for a long period for biological evolution, and their planet accreted near the outer edge of the habitable zone.

Such a cool image:

http://martianchronicles.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/jupiter-aurora.jpg

The billion watt lightshow of Jupiter's aurora borealis, as seen in UV by Hubble. The Galilean moons leave footprints in the magnetic Birkeland currents, clearly visible has bright spots.

When it comes to this particular solar system, Earth's got everyone else beat with the best porridge.

Oops, that should be trillion watt lightshow. About the power consumed by 100 large cities on Earth.

Be sure to consider Holst in your deliberations...

They used have a measurement of infinite resistance. When trillions of volts can use the vacuum of space as a conductor between Jupiter + a satellite it renders IR nonsense.

Hey Sanpaku, could you do a brief summary of how you believe Mars became a dead planet? No pressure like, I think you add a lot to these type of threads and love reading your responses.

the main theory about mars' current state, in my understanding, is more or less like:

mars is a lot smaller than earth, so as time went by its molten iron core cooled and volcanic activity on the planet stopped. the lack of a hot metallic core led to the death of mars' magnetic field, which meant the dangerous particles blasted out by the sun stripped the planet of its atmosphere. ta da, dead planet.

That is also my reading of Mars. I suppose that means our molten core is finite, but just hasn't cooled down yet because the extra mass gives it more time.

Mars is the only tectonically inert terrestrial planet, right?

Venus, for being the hottest, I'm so shallow.

Hottest despite being only second nearest the sun.

Saturn. Saturn. Saturn. Years ago when they were seemingly discovering new moons every minute, I was really into the jostling between Saturn and Jupiter and was totally cheering Saturn on. MORE MOONS FOR YOU, SATURN, YOU ROCK.

Jupiter is OK but it's no Saturn. And its rings are poxy.

MORE MOONS FOR YOU, SATURN, YOU ROCK GAS BALL.

Saturn has a giant hexagon. Close thread.

http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SaturnHex-RGB-11-28-12-JMajor.jpg

Almost turquoise, too.

saturn's hexagon looks like a creepy jello pancake O_O

you'll sing a different tune when we're all being transported to saturn, to escape earth's fire-y doom, in 15 years.

i don't care as long as I get to ride on the hula hoop

jupiter's gas giantness and saturn's rings have a lot to recommend them but venus and its atmosphere really do it for me. a place where the air was toxic and unimaginably hot really got into my imagination as a kid.

damn, this poll sent me back to my childhood when I was super into outer space. reading about all the crazy stuff happening in our own cosmic backyard just blows my mind.

and whoever said it up-thread about this being the hardest poll is otm. been thinking about it for hours and still can't pick a favourite.

voted saturn but now i'm wishing i voted jupiter, it just seems to have a lot more going on

same here xp. i was super into space as a kid but took it as more 'normal' because that's what kids do. now that i'm older i can understand how truly insane it all is that something like jupiter exists, and that we exist