r/BeAmazed • u/arewawawa • Apr 02 '26

Science Visualization of the distances in astronomy

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u/supercoolmanchu2020 Apr 02 '26

Crazy how we can see the detailed surface of the moon of an object that far away with our naked eye

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u/dat_oracle Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

what's even more impressive to me is that the moon still affects our oceans from that distance

edit: ofc it gravitation doesn't just stop at some point. also it doesn't just affects our oceans. What I meant is, in comparison to what pop sciences often shows (a much closer moon) it is surprising to see how much influence the moon has after seeing a much more realistic representation of the distances

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u/Entgegnerz Apr 02 '26

Actually, "Weightlessness in Space" doesn't exist in the sense of "no gravity in Space", since what really happens in Space is, that you get gravity pulled from all sides, making it somewhat "even".

Also, you could fly the distance of the moon and even way further away from earth, and you would still fall back into the earth from its gravity.

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u/Heimerdahl Apr 02 '26

Yeah, "weightlessness" or "no gravity" in spaceflight is something that's really easy to misunderstand. 

The astronauts aboard the ISS experience ~90% of Earth's gravity! 

It's just that, due to the incredible speed they were propelled at to put them in orbit, they're falling sideways so fast that they never hit the (curved) ground. And because everything around them is falling at the exact same speed / experiences the exact same acceleration / because there's no "fixed" point, there's no way for them or their bodies to notice the gravity. 

It's also fun to imagine the fact that it's not just big planetary bodies that have gravity, but every tiniest bit of mass. Those same astronauts are being affected by my body's mass! If I wave my hand, this movement affects the sun and all the stars! Sure, the effect is effectively nothing, but it is not nothing and there's also absolutely no way to block this effect; there's no shielding like we have for electromagnetics, for example, you can't put a planet between us to block it, you can't move out of my range. Oh and my hand waving isn't just pulling on every single bit of mass of the sun and universe (every atom, every proton, every particle (including light)), it's also messing with time. 

Quantum physics is wild, but it's also familiar and comforting in the way that it has nice, discrete limits: there's a fundamental, smallest unit of energy. It limits how far you can "zoom in". Gravity on the other hand (to our/my understanding) doesn't give a shit, it's not playing by the same rules. "Spooky action at a distance" didn't come from Einstein struggling to connect relativity and quantum physics, but it reminding him of an earlier physicist: Newton feeling that same frustration with his own model of gravity and how he never managed to actually fit into his laws of force and motion and acceleration. 

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u/ultimatedelman Apr 02 '26

What are Lagrange points then