They had some inhospitable weather over the eons! An incredible story indeed. It’s great to see material like this that stitches together the huge amount of evidence there is now in the geological and fossil record. More and more evidence is being added every day. And in recent years a lot of supporting evidence or missing bits have been provided by the oil and gas drilling industry and that includes the Chicxulub crater. Mrs Ash struggles to get her head around this sort of thing.
My son and I watched this documentary about a year ago and yesterday he remembered Theia and the hypothesis that it crashed into the Earth and that the resulting debris formed the moon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet) Well, my little man told me about the previously thought largest star "UY Scuti" so it was no surprise that he remembered Theia
Theia is the best explanation to date for the Earth Moon double planet system. And yes Red supergiants and hypergiants are the largest stars to ever exist.
Anybody seen this yet? It was in the U.K. and then lockdown put a stop to the tour. “Museum of the Moon will next be presented in: Nelson Provincial Museum, New Zealand, open until 19 April *currently closed Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria, open until 1 June *currently closed Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, open until 30 June *currently closed Contemporary Calgary, Canada, 23 January – 15 March *currently closed The Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, USA, 4 March – 13 April *currently closed Bristol Cathedral, UK, 7 – 31 August *postponed, new dates TBA Durham Cathedral, UK, 12 September – 6 November (There are several moons touring simultaneously) Presented previously in: 2020 Rochester Cathedral, UK. Illuminate, Oldham, UK. Adelaide Fringe, Australia. LlumBcn Festival, Barcelona. GROW Festival, Corby, UK. City of Perth, Australia. “
I didn't want to be a smartass Wikipedia user earlier Mike, it was really nice and cool that your wee boy remembered about UY Scuti. Stephenson 2-18 is 4316 times the diameter of our sun that makes it about 4 billion miles in diameter roughly, it would engulf Saturn if it was here. ooops I made a mistake and corrected it (I said Neptune)
These stars are very young, because they start out as very large hot stars about 15 times the mass of our sun they burn their fuel, hydrogen, very quickly and rapidly move on to the helium burning stage which is what makes them grow so large, this one is probably close to the limit for the red giant stage. There are much more massive blue giants like Eta Carinae which is up to 100 times the mass of our sun but they tend to go direct to supernova and black hole, the likes of Stephenson 2-18 will experience a type 2 supernova and result in a neutron star. Massive stars have a very short life, they are the factories that manufacture the stuff that you and me and everyone else is made of, stars of 25 solar masses and up make all the stuff around us and they do that pretty quickly in cosmological terms. The blue giants are the really spectacular stars because of their mass not so much because of their size.
For those that might be interested. The video is taken in Durham Cathedral: I see that this exhibition is down to be in Birmingham in the summer holidays but am not sure if that was from a pre Covid 19 perspective. I had been keeping my eye on it as I planned for us to go. It looks impressive in the video.
It has been postulated that the dinosaurs died out owing to a lack of vitamin D. Did Triceratops need a vitamin d supplement? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...plements-have-saved-the-triceratops-31817900/
I doubt it, would small mammals have become extinct too? They too would have become extinct if that was the reason.
I know. Same for the birds. They managed to squeeze through after the demise of the (non flying) dinosaurs. I intend to go back in my time machine and check these things out. This theory, as that is what it is, is one of a number of theories. All we have to go on really are the rocks beneath our feet and what they reveal and they only reveal so much. Personally I like the thinking and also the story postulated in the opening post as it puts some flesh on the bones / skeleton of what we do know and gives us some idea of how things might have been.
Saw this today. Up in Ulverston in Cumbria (where Laurel and Hardy started off). It wasn’t as good as I expected but okay.
This is going to sound stupid but I don’t remember. I do remember asking myself the same question when we were leaving Ulverston. The moon itself is a 1:500000 replica so that each centimetre represented 5km of the moons surface. And the whole thing is made in segments spliced together. You can see the splice lines but see later * There is no dark side as such as the whole surface is equally illuminated. All from NASA imagery. I was disappointed at the venue as it would have been more impressive inside a more impressive building. But we had a good day out in the Lake District. It was free to enter and view. If they show it at Liverpool Cathedral it will probably be worth your while dropping in. * It is an inflatable. Here is what Wikipedia say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_the_Moon Wikipedia suggests the surface is smooth. So that will save me driving back up to check. They had Covid19 procedure in place and was taking the 7yo round so I have to admit contouring slipped my notice. And internally lit. One thing I did notice is that it seemed pretty spherical. Is the moon a perfect sphere?
Ah so it is a printed translucent sphere, yeah I could see the splicing but wasn't sure if that was also a projection. So it's an interesting print or painting. The moon like the earth is an oblate spheroid but almost perfectly spherical, the oblateness will have been due to rotation during cooling I expect. It would be fun to see it.
