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152 votes
2 answers
28k views

XKCD 1944 claims that there is "more gold in the sun than water in the oceans". Is this really true?
Jakub Šturc's user avatar
  • 1,399
140 votes
3 answers
26k views

Sound can't travel through outer space. But if it could, how loud would the Sun be? Would the sound be dangerous to life on Earth, or would we barely hear it from this distance?
Jamie's user avatar
  • 1,159
113 votes
1 answer
24k views

I've heard from a few sources* recently that the Sun is a 1,000th generation star, meaning it had a thousand stars that came before it based on its heavy-element content. I understand that earlier ...
Benjam's user avatar
  • 1,249
96 votes
2 answers
13k views

I'm fairly certain people here will have heard about it, already, but apparently, two supernova leftovers clashed some 130 million years ago and some billion billion kilometres away ... What I haven'...
User1291's user avatar
  • 1,013
94 votes
6 answers
9k views

The planets rotate as an after effect of their creation, the dust clouds that compressed span as they did so and the inertia has kept it rotating ever since. It's fairly easy to prove that planetary ...
user avatar
88 votes
13 answers
24k views

In astronomy distances are generally expressed in non-metric units like: light-years, astronomical units (AU), parsecs, etc. Why don't they use meters (or multiples thereof) to measure distances, as ...
Arne's user avatar
  • 1,005
88 votes
2 answers
22k views

Wikipedia says the Chicxulub impactor is thought to have been a 10-15 km diameter object. Would it have been visible to a (human*) naked eye before impact? And if so, would it have appeared like a ...
Robert's user avatar
  • 985
82 votes
6 answers
12k views

In doing research on vision, I have learned that "20/20" vision corresponds to a visual acuity of being able to resolve details 1 arcminute in size, that most people have around 20/15 vision,...
Phrogz's user avatar
  • 947
78 votes
4 answers
11k views

I just want to be sure I am visualizing this correctly, because it seems odd. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth but there are wobbles to its motion due to libration. So from a point on the ...
kim holder's user avatar
  • 1,577
78 votes
2 answers
11k views

As the title says, what happens when a gravitational wave approaches a black hole? I would presume that something interesting happens because of the way spacetime works near black holes but I have no ...
dalearn's user avatar
  • 833
77 votes
5 answers
16k views

There are closer galaxies than Messier 87 for sure, even ours! It sparked my curiosity that they went with one 53 million light years away. Is there a reason for this?
Morgan's user avatar
  • 753
75 votes
2 answers
16k views

This might sound like a strange question, but something got me thinking about it recently. The opacity of plasma in stellar interiors can get quite high, making for shorter free-paths for photons. In ...
Swike's user avatar
  • 4,001
74 votes
6 answers
18k views

Why do we only ever see the same side of the moon? If this is to do with gravity are there any variables which mean we might one day see more than we have before?
Rob's user avatar
  • 859
72 votes
5 answers
24k views

Does our galaxy moves through space? Or does it stay in a single location? If it does move, what causes it to move?
Mike's user avatar
  • 753
72 votes
5 answers
6k views

In this answer to Is lithium considered a metal in astronomy? this image from Wikimedia of the abundances of elements in the universe was shared: Credit: Wikimedia Commons user 28bytes, under C.C.-by-...
curiousdannii's user avatar
  • 627

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