We aren’t sure yet, but we are likely the only place in the galaxy that has the perfect total eclipses. If humanity ever manages to unite and take to the stars, there’s a strong argument to be made for our flag to just be a black field with a solar corona. We may even have to worry about too much extra-terrestrial eclipse tourism.
We aren’t sure yet, but we are likely the only place in the galaxy that has the perfect total eclipses.
I’m frankly dubious about this - tons of extrasolar planets will have moons, and those moons will occlude their stars. what in any way makes earth special? citation requested.
The extremely unlikely, a d actually entirely coincidental, fact that our moon happens to be precisely the right size and distance from the sun and moon to perfectly obscure it.
If it were further away or smaller, it wouldn’t block it out completely and we’d just get annular eclipses, which doesn’t let you see the corona, just a ring you shouldn’t look at directly without eye protection.
If it were bigger or closer, it would obscure the corona and we’d just see darkness.
Stellar bodies lining up is perfectly normal and commonplace. Them being exactly the right size shape and distance to create a total eclipse is fantastically unlikely.
Doubly so when you consider that the moon is slowly moving away, and so a long time ago the moon was too big in the sky, and in about 50 million years it’ll be too small.
Something so unlikely happening during the time there’s intelligent life on the planet that can understand and appreciate it is, literally and figuratively, astronomicaly unlikely. 😀
The extremely unlikely, a d actually entirely coincidental, fact that our moon happens to be precisely the right size and distance from the sun and moon to perfectly obscure it.
it’s extremely unlikely and entirely coincidental that your hand is exactly the size to obscure your vision. this doesn’t speak for the odds of it never happening again elsewhere in the universe.
Like, the thing about the hand aside, if something is extremely unlikely, that literally speaks to the odds of it happening. That’s what unlikely means.
Your hand covering your face isn’t coincidental or unlikely; everyone’s hand does and it’s written into your genetics that it should.
There’s no particular reason why a big rock should end up in the particular place it did for us, and it’s surprising that it did.
It’s not likely that it happens often because there’s no reason for it to happen, unlike other interesting phenomenon we see like the big red spot on Jupiter or the hexagon on Saturn. Those should be common because there’s a systemic reason they happened.
they’re both conjecture based on a microscopic sample size.
Your hand covering your face isn’t coincidental or unlikely; everyone’s hand does and it’s written into your genetics that it should.
ahem, this is so wrong in so many ways.
everyone’s hand does
Nope.
and it’s written into your genetics that it should.
pshew wow nope nope nope.
Nothing in your genes controls a proportional size relationship of your hands to your head. And not everyone has large hands, look at trump for example.
There’s no particular reason why a big rock should end up in the particular place it did for us,
you really don’t understand planetary formation, stability in orbital mechanics and a bunch of subjects. there’s tons of good reasons to suspect the other planets had moons as well; they simply weren’t as orbitally stable as ours ended up.
The only thing your (and other person I’m responding to here) argument has going for it is the extraordinarily difficulty of resolving exomoons orbiting exoplanets around our neighborhood.
I only specified the Milky Way, not the entire universe. It would be highly unlikely that we’d be the only place in the universe that it happened, but the chances are potentially low enough for it being the only one among a mere 100,000,000,000 stars.
The formation of our moon isn’t terribly likely to happen frequently. Also the moon, star, and planet have to be in the correct places. Our moon won’t create perfect eclipses in a few hundred million years
It’s speculation, but there are only 100 billion stars in the galaxy. I’m willing to bet that we have a 1 in a 100 billion chance of our solar systems creation being different from the others.
that’s pretty silly. you’re suggesting that in our galaxy we’re the only place this happens - what about our solar system is so exceptional, when we see similar planetary formation all over the galaxy?
and also, there are between 200 billion (2×1011) to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe - you gonna write them off too?
you have a sample size of one - one solar system. that’s it.
seems fucking moronic to be making billions or trillions of assumptions based on your experience.
If there’s another planet in our solar system where you can almost get an earth-like “perfect” solar eclipse, I find it highly unlikely that there isn’t a single other planet in our entire galaxy where one might also see a “perfect” solar eclipse.
Both of Mars’ moons are either too small or too far from the planet to completely occlude the sun, but your article is about a moon of Saturn.
I’m not sure I would count a planet that no human or rover has a chance to see the eclipse, and at that distance the sun is TINY, but I’ll bet that Pandora completely occludes both the sun and it’s corona.
It’s highly likely that no other planet in the galaxy has the correct conditions for a perfect solar eclipse.
It’s also massively over hyped imo. I did the last one and the coolest part was the shadows, but the actual darkness was super underwhelming. Hearing everyone say it was like some spiritual experience makes me roll my eyes a bit. It got dark for a bit. It does that shit every day smh.
People aren’t amazed because it gets dark for a bit. People are amazed because it reminds us that the sun and the moon are real 3d objects incredibly far away, not just images in the sky. I can understand how it is a spiritual experience for a lot of people.
It’s also an incredible coincidence (or otherwise, depending on your beliefs) how the distance and size of the two bodies matches perfectly for the total eclipse to be a thing at all.
I mean it was cool, don’t get me wrong. But greatest thing I’ve ever seen? IDK, I saw a space shuttle launch live. That was way cooler. Dark Knight in IMAX is a contender. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen is basically the entire country of Iceland. The Eclipse is maybe top 20.
It’s possible I just did the eclipse wrong. I am glad you enjoyed it. I don’t quite understand why so many people take it personally that I was not moved by it.
Space shuttle is pretty cool. Personally wouldn’t put any movie experience in the same universe as the eclipse.
Like it’s entirely possible that we’re the only planet in the galaxy that has eclipses like that and quite possibly the only one in the universe with life on it to witness such an event.
And you’re stood there watching as a incomprehensiblely big ball of rock held above us by nothing more than its own angular momentum happe s to perfectly cross infront of and block out and even possibly bigger ball of fusing gas and do it so perfectly it blocks the disk of the sin but leave the corona and solar flares still visible to the naked eye, you watch the world around start to die in the most unnatural way, the temperature drops and then suddenly its night time in the middle of the day, the animals go crazy, you have a 360° sunset and the sun is replaced by black disk surrounded by s ring of fire. Its pretty much a supernatural event.
So I just really cannot comprehend how anyone could /possibly/ compare it watching a movie. That’s like comparing witnessing the birth of your own child to finding a dollar on the street.
But all that stuff is still true whether you see it yourself or not. I don’t quite get this line of reasoning. Were you unsure about the nature of astral bodies before that point?
Again, I have no intention of diminishing your experience, unlike you mine. I am super happy that you had a surreal experience. I just felt extremely underwhelmed personally.
Also, people keep saying this about animals, but I didn’t witness that at all. My dog slept through it.
glad it was good for you man. having seen a few… both full and partial… it was just some thing that happened. I did really appreciate seeing the wiggly shadow bands, was not expecting that, but it isn’t anywhere near the ‘greatest single thing I’ve ever seen in my life’. Not even in the top 20.
That seems likely, and unfortunate. To a lot of people it looks like all of the pictures that get posted to the Internet after the eclipse, except a fair bit more impactful because it’s there. The sky turns dark blue, you see the coronal glow as tendrils of light coming away from the hole in the sky where the sun was a moment before.
Easily one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_21st_century
Not a lot of TOTAL eclipses. And the next US total is 20 years.
Unless you can afford to fly (and stay) internationally, it might very well be once in a lifetime to witness totality.
South East Asia here, no total eclipse for the next 200 years. And I slept through the last one when I was in middle school, FML.
2035 is reasonably promising, depending on where you are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_September_2,_2035
Nope LOL. The edge is barely skate by where I live.
Trust me, I looked it up with a whole bunch of “eclipse prediction” websites.
Oh are you like at the equator? Yeah that’s gonna be a really hard location to get and you will need to go north or south a bit for most of them.
You’re so knowledgeable. And yes, I’m ~2500km up north from the equator.
Nah, the crash of the 1999 AN10 in August, 2027 keeps humans survivors from seeing that one.
There are two crossing through eastern Australia in the next decade, maybe take a trip there?
We aren’t sure yet, but we are likely the only place in the galaxy that has the perfect total eclipses. If humanity ever manages to unite and take to the stars, there’s a strong argument to be made for our flag to just be a black field with a solar corona. We may even have to worry about too much extra-terrestrial eclipse tourism.
Solar eclipses on Mars are underwhelming.
I can see eclipses being an interstellar tourist attraction.
I was talking to some friends about it actually. Probably makes for memorable vacations.
I’m frankly dubious about this - tons of extrasolar planets will have moons, and those moons will occlude their stars. what in any way makes earth special? citation requested.
The extremely unlikely, a d actually entirely coincidental, fact that our moon happens to be precisely the right size and distance from the sun and moon to perfectly obscure it.
If it were further away or smaller, it wouldn’t block it out completely and we’d just get annular eclipses, which doesn’t let you see the corona, just a ring you shouldn’t look at directly without eye protection.
If it were bigger or closer, it would obscure the corona and we’d just see darkness.
Stellar bodies lining up is perfectly normal and commonplace. Them being exactly the right size shape and distance to create a total eclipse is fantastically unlikely.
Doubly so when you consider that the moon is slowly moving away, and so a long time ago the moon was too big in the sky, and in about 50 million years it’ll be too small.
Something so unlikely happening during the time there’s intelligent life on the planet that can understand and appreciate it is, literally and figuratively, astronomicaly unlikely. 😀
it’s extremely unlikely and entirely coincidental that your hand is exactly the size to obscure your vision. this doesn’t speak for the odds of it never happening again elsewhere in the universe.
What?
Like, the thing about the hand aside, if something is extremely unlikely, that literally speaks to the odds of it happening. That’s what unlikely means.
Your hand covering your face isn’t coincidental or unlikely; everyone’s hand does and it’s written into your genetics that it should.
There’s no particular reason why a big rock should end up in the particular place it did for us, and it’s surprising that it did.
It’s not likely that it happens often because there’s no reason for it to happen, unlike other interesting phenomenon we see like the big red spot on Jupiter or the hexagon on Saturn. Those should be common because there’s a systemic reason they happened.
they’re both conjecture based on a microscopic sample size.
ahem, this is so wrong in so many ways.
Nope.
pshew wow nope nope nope.
Nothing in your genes controls a proportional size relationship of your hands to your head. And not everyone has large hands, look at trump for example.
you really don’t understand planetary formation, stability in orbital mechanics and a bunch of subjects. there’s tons of good reasons to suspect the other planets had moons as well; they simply weren’t as orbitally stable as ours ended up.
The only thing your (and other person I’m responding to here) argument has going for it is the extraordinarily difficulty of resolving exomoons orbiting exoplanets around our neighborhood.
I only specified the Milky Way, not the entire universe. It would be highly unlikely that we’d be the only place in the universe that it happened, but the chances are potentially low enough for it being the only one among a mere 100,000,000,000 stars.
The formation of our moon isn’t terribly likely to happen frequently. Also the moon, star, and planet have to be in the correct places. Our moon won’t create perfect eclipses in a few hundred million years
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/earth-has-the-solar-systems-best-eclipses/
sorry, this is hardly definitive. we need more extrasolar surveys before you can posit that we’re the only place. anything else is conjecture.
It’s speculation, but there are only 100 billion stars in the galaxy. I’m willing to bet that we have a 1 in a 100 billion chance of our solar systems creation being different from the others.
that’s pretty silly. you’re suggesting that in our galaxy we’re the only place this happens - what about our solar system is so exceptional, when we see similar planetary formation all over the galaxy?
and also, there are between 200 billion (2×1011) to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe - you gonna write them off too?
you have a sample size of one - one solar system. that’s it.
seems fucking moronic to be making billions or trillions of assumptions based on your experience.
Now you’re just making shit up I never said. Have fun being ignorant.
In fact, in my original comment, and another reply specifically said that I was only talking about our galaxy, and not even our local group.
oh so there’s something exclusively special about our galaxy?
why would our galaxy not be representative of the larger universe?
make your crap make sense bro.
No planet in our solar system has a moon large enough to completely eclipse the sun from the planet surface POV
do you mean, no OTHER planet? aside from the one we’re on?
also: restricting it to the few rocks in our back yard seems specious as there are literally billion so of other stars out there.
So, what was your point?
Source?
It looks like you would get a perfect solar eclipse on Mars if Pandora were spherical.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2018/08/10/earth-is-not-the-only-planet-in-the-solar-system-that-gets-total-solar-eclipses/
If there’s another planet in our solar system where you can almost get an earth-like “perfect” solar eclipse, I find it highly unlikely that there isn’t a single other planet in our entire galaxy where one might also see a “perfect” solar eclipse.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/04/08/solar-eclipse-mars-phobos-nasa-photos/73242215007/
Forbes messed up their math.Both of Mars’ moons are either too small or too far from the planet to completely occlude the sun, but your article is about a moon of Saturn.
I’m not sure I would count a planet that no human or rover has a chance to see the eclipse, and at that distance the sun is TINY, but I’ll bet that Pandora completely occludes both the sun and it’s corona.
It’s highly likely that no other planet in the galaxy has the correct conditions for a perfect solar eclipse.
yup, they think they can speak for literally billions of stars with potentially billions and billions of planets… seems like a tall order lol
It’s also massively over hyped imo. I did the last one and the coolest part was the shadows, but the actual darkness was super underwhelming. Hearing everyone say it was like some spiritual experience makes me roll my eyes a bit. It got dark for a bit. It does that shit every day smh.
People aren’t amazed because it gets dark for a bit. People are amazed because it reminds us that the sun and the moon are real 3d objects incredibly far away, not just images in the sky. I can understand how it is a spiritual experience for a lot of people.
It’s also an incredible coincidence (or otherwise, depending on your beliefs) how the distance and size of the two bodies matches perfectly for the total eclipse to be a thing at all.
Technically it would be fine for the moon to be bigger or closer and you’d still get a total eclipse.
It turns out, animals get freaked out when sun does weird thing, and we’re animals too
EDIT: I went and it was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. That still just means I was bowled over by a rock casting a shadow. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This is the most wrong comment I have ever seen on this entire fucking website.
I can assure anyone reading this, that this guy is just being a contrarian to seem better than other people.
The eclipse was the single greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
I mean it was cool, don’t get me wrong. But greatest thing I’ve ever seen? IDK, I saw a space shuttle launch live. That was way cooler. Dark Knight in IMAX is a contender. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen is basically the entire country of Iceland. The Eclipse is maybe top 20.
It’s possible I just did the eclipse wrong. I am glad you enjoyed it. I don’t quite understand why so many people take it personally that I was not moved by it.
Space shuttle is pretty cool. Personally wouldn’t put any movie experience in the same universe as the eclipse.
Like it’s entirely possible that we’re the only planet in the galaxy that has eclipses like that and quite possibly the only one in the universe with life on it to witness such an event.
And you’re stood there watching as a incomprehensiblely big ball of rock held above us by nothing more than its own angular momentum happe s to perfectly cross infront of and block out and even possibly bigger ball of fusing gas and do it so perfectly it blocks the disk of the sin but leave the corona and solar flares still visible to the naked eye, you watch the world around start to die in the most unnatural way, the temperature drops and then suddenly its night time in the middle of the day, the animals go crazy, you have a 360° sunset and the sun is replaced by black disk surrounded by s ring of fire. Its pretty much a supernatural event.
So I just really cannot comprehend how anyone could /possibly/ compare it watching a movie. That’s like comparing witnessing the birth of your own child to finding a dollar on the street.
But all that stuff is still true whether you see it yourself or not. I don’t quite get this line of reasoning. Were you unsure about the nature of astral bodies before that point?
Again, I have no intention of diminishing your experience, unlike you mine. I am super happy that you had a surreal experience. I just felt extremely underwhelmed personally.
Also, people keep saying this about animals, but I didn’t witness that at all. My dog slept through it.
glad it was good for you man. having seen a few… both full and partial… it was just some thing that happened. I did really appreciate seeing the wiggly shadow bands, was not expecting that, but it isn’t anywhere near the ‘greatest single thing I’ve ever seen in my life’. Not even in the top 20.
I am so sad for you. Your life must have been a painful disappointment up until today.
Man with people like you it’s really like I never left reddit.
I’m sure everybody thinks you’re really cool because you’re not impressed by a thing that impresses a lot of people.
People like to find meaning in all sorts of things.
Did you forget to look at it?
No one is getting hyped for it being dark outside, they’re hyped for being able to see the corona of the sun with their naked eyes.
Maybe that’s it, my vision isn’t that great. It just looked like a blurry ring of light in the sky to me.
That seems likely, and unfortunate. To a lot of people it looks like all of the pictures that get posted to the Internet after the eclipse, except a fair bit more impactful because it’s there. The sky turns dark blue, you see the coronal glow as tendrils of light coming away from the hole in the sky where the sun was a moment before.
Easily one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.
People tend to forget only 37% of US americans have a working passport.
That’s because only 63% of us can afford international travel and most of the 37% goes to Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean.
Or go outside at midnight, which is technically a total eclipse.
Uh, how do you figure that?
I guess it’s the sun being “eclipsed” by the Earth? Since it’s between us and the sun?
That’s all I got, and it feels like a hell of a stretch
Yes, lame joke. I have to stop posting before I finish my coffee.
I hear that
Yeah, all I could think of. Not exactly the same thing…