Odd question about the solar system...

[xSilverPhinx]

I don't think of the sun having an above or a below, same with the earth.  Most globes have me walking upside down, I very rarely do.

And the hat never shoots up, good thing too

[hismikeness]

I don't think of the sun having an above or a below, same with the earth.  Most globes have me walking upside down, I very rarely do.

Do all the toilets really flush backwards down there too?

[Sandra Craft]

Thanks, Whitney!

And BooksCatsEtc, I love that picture too. I especially love real pictures of nebulas, etc. 

Do you have this link?  NASA's pic of the day

[The Magic Pudding]

I don't think of the sun having an above or a below, same with the earth.  Most globes have me walking upside down, I very rarely do.

Do all the toilets really flush backwards down there too?

Draining in bathtubs and toilets

In 1908, the Austrian physicist Otto Tumlirz described careful and effective experiments which demonstrated the effect of the rotation of the Earth on the outflow of water through a central aperture.[27] The subject was later popularized in a famous article in the journal Nature, which described an experiment in which all other forces to the system were removed by filling a 6-foot (1.8 m) tank with 300 US gallons (1,100 l) of water and allowing it to settle for 24 hours (to allow any movement due to filling the tank to die away), in a room where the temperature had stabilized. The drain plug was then very slowly removed, and tiny pieces of floating wood were used to observe rotation. During the first 12 to 15 minutes, no rotation was observed. Then, a vortex appeared and consistently began to rotate in a counter-clockwise direction (the experiment was performed in Boston, Massachusetts, in the Northern hemisphere). This was repeated and the results averaged to make sure the effect was real. The report noted that the vortex rotated, "about 30,000 times faster than the effective rotation of the earth in 42° North (the experiment's location)". This shows that the small initial rotation due to the earth is amplified by gravitational draining and conservation of angular momentum to become a rapid vortex and may be observed under carefully controlled laboratory conditions.[28][29]

In contrast to the above, water rotation in home bathrooms under normal circumstances is not related to the Coriolis effect or to the rotation of the earth, and no consistent difference in rotation direction between toilets in the northern and southern hemispheres can be observed. The formation of a vortex over the plug hole may be explained by the conservation of angular momentum: The radius of rotation decreases as water approaches the plug hole so the rate of rotation increases, for the same reason that an ice skater's rate of spin increases as she pulls her arms in. Any rotation around the plug hole that is initially present accelerates as water moves inward. Only if the water is so still that the effective rotation rate of the earth (once per day at the poles, once every 2 days at 30 degrees of latitude) is faster than that of the water relative to its container, and if externally applied torques (such as might be caused by flow over an uneven bottom surface) are small enough, the Coriolis effect may determine the direction of the vortex. Without such careful preparation, the Coriolis effect may be much smaller than various other influences on drain direction,[30] such as any residual rotation of the water[31] and the geometry of the container.[32] Despite this, the idea that toilets and bathtubs drain differently in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres has been popularized by several television programs, including The Simpsons episode "Bart vs. Australia" and The X-Files episode "Die Hand Die Verletzt".[33] Several science broadcasts and publications, including at least one college-level physics textbook, have also stated this

That is a good wiki, it's about the Coriolis effect, not just toilets.
My impression is water rotates clockwise which should be considered the correct way, it's what clocks do after all.

[Amicale]

Thanks, Whitney!

And BooksCatsEtc, I love that picture too. I especially love real pictures of nebulas, etc. 

Do you have this link?  NASA's pic of the day

Wow, no I didn't! But I do now, thanks to you! *bookmarks*

[Crocoduck]

OK, I'm sure I'm going to embarass myself by asking this, but hey, an honest question is an honest question, and I don't mind admitting that when it comes to this aspect of science, I'm ignorant. It's a question I've always had, so please stifle your giggles, and if you have an answer, I'd appreciate it. (And you probably will giggle, since this is the sort of question a third grader might ask!) But nothing ventured, nothing gained, I suppose...

First, a picture:



OK, so of course the planets orbit around the sun, with the sun in the center. My question, then, is if we were to hypothetically be standing on the sun (assume for a moment we could), what is above the sun if you keep on going up? And what's below the sun, if you keep on going down? Since planets revolve around the sun, I'm assuming that if you went far enough above it, or below it, you'd travel through space until you eventually reached another galaxy. Is that correct? Or, are there just asteroids, etc, or simply empty space?

I never took science in school, at least not past 11th grade biology, so... yeah. I've looked at different space websites, but I haven't found much of anything that answers my question.

Please be merciful to a curious, well meaning but ignorant (on this topic anyhow) woman. 

I hope this doesn't come off as too nit picky but having just listened to Neil Degrasse Tyson's The Pluto Files I think that picture of the solar system is a bit dated. We now only recognize eight planets.

The four Terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, The Earth and Mars.

Then the four Gas Giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Poor little Pluto used to be thought of as the ninth planet from the sun but is now considered a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet or a plutoid.

Not that it's a very big deal but we do see our solar system a little differently now.

[Amicale]

I hope this doesn't come off as too nit picky but having just listened to Neil Degrasse Tyson's The Pluto Files I think that picture of the solar system is a bit dated. We now only recognize eight planets.

The four Terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, The Earth and Mars.

Then the four Gas Giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Poor little Pluto used to be thought of as the ninth planet from the sun but is now considered a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet or a plutoid.

Not that it's a very big deal but we do see our solar system a little differently now.

Nope, not too nit-picky at all. When I posted the picture, I even thought to myself 'well, Pluto's in there still, but the picture's good enough for what I want to show'. Basically, I was looking for a decent photo that kind of illustrated the question I was asking.

I feel bad for poor little Pluto.  My daughter loves pictures of planets, etc (anything to do with nature really) and I told her 'when I was a kid, Pluto was actually still a planet!" and her first comment was "wow mama, you're old!"  followed by "why isn't it one, did it want to be something else??" -- I love her questions so much. She'll be four not too long from now, and she's been asking all kinds of questions lately. Yay!

[Crocoduck]

Neil Degrasse Tyson's book The Pluto Files is pretty good. He includes lots of email he's received from children who were upset with him and the Hayden Planetarium over poor little Pluto's fall from grace. I bet he'd enjoy hearing your daughters opinion. 

[Dobermonster]

I learned something new from this thread, this is great stuff (especially, to me, the diagram of the Oort cloud, which I'd heard of but didn't really know about).

Slightly off-topic, but look at the NASA link for today - a time-lapse video of extraordinarily vibrant aurora borealis. One of the most stunning natural phenomena, IMO. I could watch that for hours.

[Ali]

I'm sad about Pluto.  This makes no sense whatsoever, but I really wish we could keep it as a planet "for old time's sake."  Once a planet, always a planet, you know?   

My MIL is currently reading the book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.  I want to read it after she's done.

[Amicale]

I'm sad about Pluto.  This makes no sense whatsoever, but I really wish we could keep it as a planet "for old time's sake."  Once a planet, always a planet, you know?   

My MIL is currently reading the book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.  I want to read it after she's done.

That sounds like an interesting book! I'll have to see about getting ahold of that somewhere.

And yeah, I'm in the 'why didn't they just let it stay a planet' camp too. 

Although, it does kinda make me think... it's interesting that for billions of years, all of these planets, asteroids, stars etc were forming... being pulled in different directions... rearranging themselves... and then bam, out of nowhere comes these arrogant humans who not only name them, but decide what they are, or aren't. Poor planets. Maybe they wanted other names and designations.   

[Stevil]

Does anyone know how the plane that the planets generally orbit on around our sun, how this plane relates to the position of the centre of our galaxy?

[Tank]

Does anyone know how the plane that the planets generally orbit on around our sun, how this plane relates to the position of the centre of our galaxy?

http://cs.astronomy.com/asycs/forums/p/31176/449781.aspx

[Sandra Craft]

I've heard people wonder why it gets dark at night when there are so many things in the universe give off light.  This is something I've wondered about but didn't know the answer to and felt a little dumb asking.  Today I read a really great answer:

The universe had a beginning, about fifteen billion years ago.  Space may be infinite, but time had a start.  Because light travels at a finite velocity, there is a limit to the part of the universe that we can see.  We can't see galaxies that are more than fifteen billion light-years away because there hasn't been enough time for their light to reach us.  Even if the universe is infinitely big, the part of it that we can observe is finite, and therefore the number of stars and galaxies we can observe are finite -- and this is the ture resolution of Olber's paradox.  The night sky is dark because the universe is young!  Chet Raymo, in Natural Prayers

[Crocoduck]

I've heard people wonder why it gets dark at night when there are so many things in the universe give off light. 

The fact that we have night time is one of the proofs of the Big Bang. In an infinity old universe thats full of billions of galaxies, each one filled with billions of stars, the earth should be bathed in light in all places and at all times.