give it a few hundred million years and ours won’t be able to do a total solar eclipse either :(
Nonesense. We just need to lower the Moon’s orbit every so often to keep it in the sweet spot.
Earth mentioned raaaaaah 🗣️🗣️
That’s actually amazing that we have eclipse shots from Mars. Anyone know how it was taken? What instrument?
Probably a camera of some sort.
That would be my guess too. Perhaps aided by a kind of telescope.
Think about that though. I guess it’s no big deal to younger people since Mars has been reachable for their whole life, but the fact that we have robots on Mars taking pictures of a solar eclipse and sending it back to earth is just amazing to me! Mars was a huge mystery when I was a kid. Heck, my childhood was at the tail end of society wondering if there were martians living on Mars.
my childhood was at the tail end of society wondering if there were martians living on Mars
As a younger person… was this thought of as a real possibility by some people? I find that hard to believe
Idk if adults believed it was a real possibility, but us kids having read The Martian Chronicles certainly did.
Yep! They thought Venus might be habitable too. When The War of the Worlds aired, listeners (who missed the disclaimer) thought it was real and panicked.
NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has returned a stunning sequence of images of its moon, Phobos, eclipsing the sun. From Mars’ Jezero Crater, the rover’s SkyCam and MastCam took over 65 images of the event on February 8, one per second, to ensure it captured the short event.
Mars Rover pointing straight up.
👀
Love how it looks like two eyeballs 😸
Phobos is this big and still not round? Uh, what was the name, the size where stone behaves like a liquid. Well, Phobos doesn’t have that yet?
Phobos is tiny. It’s just very close compared to our moon. 9500km as compared to our 384000km.
Ah, thanks! Also, Phobos is fast!
And the sun looks smaller from Mars because it’s further away, making Phobos seem bigger
I believe you are looking for hydrostatic equilibrium. There don’t seem to be good answers for this online, but according to Robert Black on this Quora post:
There isn’t a minimium per se but the generally accepted number for a mass to form into a sphere under its own gravity is 1/10,000th the mass of the Earth or 600 quintillion kg. As for size, it really depends on the composition of the body. The numbers are generally accepted to have a diameter of about 600km for a rocky body.
A quintillion is 1 x 10 to the 18th and Phobos has a mass of 1.0659 x 10 to the 16th kilograms and a diameter of 22 kilometers.
Yes that, thanks!
I’m so happy I wasn’t the only one who saw this.
Nailed it!
How perfectly moon fits between earth and the sun is one of the weirdest things about our solar system for me.
You kidding?
There is loads of space between the Earth and the Sun to fit the Moon.
no way dude just look at it puff
Especially because it hasn’t always and it won’t forever. Humanity’s existence just happens to coincide with the period of amazing eclipses.
Yep this. Call in sick, quit, max out your credit, go halfway around the world, do literally whatever is needed to be done to see a total eclipse if you haven’t been able to experience it yet. It’s unreal.
From what I’ve seen of future eclipse maps, it’ll probably be a very long time before I get to see another eclipse at totality
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2921/
It’s pretty fantastic, but not that good.
Idk looks good to me
🌖🌔
Toothless?
awesome pic, what telescope did you use?
The void stares back
Googly eyes.
NUMBER ONE!
I mean she’s not wrong. Isn’t it, astronomically speaking, pretty rare that Earth has a moon that appears exactly the same relative size as its host star?
As far as we know it’s extremely rare and a bit of a mystery how it came to be that way. One theory is that it was the result of a collision with another protoplanet in the early formation of the solar system.
But it isn’t a mystery at all. The moon is moving away from us. For billions of years the moon’s apparent size was larger than the sun. For billions of years later it will appear smaller. It’s simply a lucky coincidence we live in this moment in time, in that regard.
I really think we should be called a twin planet system. It would be much more representative of our relationship with our satellite.
The “mystery” I was referring to was how we came to have such a large moon to begin with. It’s very unusual, and moons on other terrestrial planets are much smaller and probably formed through completely different ways than earth’s moon.
That isn’t clear at all and I’m not even sure I agree, regardless. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a regularly occuring thing. No, I’m not looking up how regular. The Universe is mind-bogglingly enormous and everything is unusual. Have a good day.
Massive W for johannesvanderwhales
You can calm down because I don’t care. Enjoy your massive W, buddy.
Edit: downvoting me again? What a rare and special ability; not just anybody can do that.
Imagine not even having a proper magnetic field smh
