OK, maybe it should be called a “transit” rather than an eclipse, but it is still fascinating to see odd-shaped Phobos make its way across the sun.
It leads one to ponder the wonderful celestial coincidence that our moon and our sun appear to be almost the same size (and shape) from our perspective, thus creating such spectacular eclipses.
Coincidence?! The sun has 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system. The moon is 1.2% earth’s mass. Huge scale disparity. You could fit 1.2 million Earth’s inside a hollow sun. Earth’s moon has 28 phases x 13 = 364. The Earth, moon, and sun are more likely tuned by God.
The similarity in the sizes of the discs is not fixed. It is only a temporary phenomenon that we are fortunate enough to observe and marvel at in our stay on the planet. Computer simulations indicate that at the time of its formation, the moon was a mere 14,000 miles away from the earth, a tiny fraction of the quarter of a million miles between the two bodies today. On that young Earth, when the Moon was newly formed, the moon would have been reddish, and would have appeared fifteen times as large as it does today.
Not only would it have appeared enormous, but it would have been seen far more often, since the earth was spinning three to five times faster than it does now! (The Moon’s braking effect operating on the Earth for the last 4.5 billion years has slowed the rotation so that it takes the 24 hours that we are familiar with now. )
In the first half billion years after its formation, the moon cooled considerably and moved away quite rapidly until it was about 80,000 miles away. By that time it would have appeared to earth in its current color (or lack thereof), and its apparent size would have been about triple the size of today’s apparent disc.
Of course it doesn’t matter how far away the moon is in another 4.5 billion years, because that is about when we are expecting the sun to “die.” And even a mere billion years from now, the earth should become totally uninhabitable because liquid water would have disappeared. But if we can make it about 600 million years, the moon will have moved far enough away that we will no longer be able to see anything resembling a total solar eclipse. If we could somehow last on earth until the dying of the sun, the moon at that point would be about 100,000 miles farther away, and would appear to be about 2/3 of its current size.
Well said. Except that “die” sounds uneventful, like old age. Like, burns up all its fuel & becomes inert.
Only, it doesn’t burn up all its fuel, at all. It takes quite a long time to get to anything like inert form. Meantime, the journey will be anything but uneventful.
The sun will collapse & rebound energetically & repeatedly. Radiation & particles, plasma & gas, will shoot out. The sun will enshroud the earth. The heat will be blistering. That’s why all the liquid water evaporates.
Three of five ways Thomas Aquinas famously believed the existence of God could be proven: is that human beings are significantly more intelligent than matter or animals(1), we can see elements of perfection in life(2), but we don’t live forever, we die; impermanence(3). The other two ways are movement(4) and cause and effect(5); with God being the ultimate source of the cause for either concept. This last idea of Thomas Aquinas of cause and effect is very testable in regards to the Big Bang theory because a small bang followed by a big bang resulting in a disintegrated atom is similar if not identical to a nuclear explosion, a two stage explosion that results in a disintegrated atom. When big bang is reframed from this nuclear perspective it is obvious how stars form and that we are part of a secondary post big bang reaction due to thermodynamic law.
Much of what we refer to as science is actually science fiction and nuclear age turnkey solutions if you look into it the subject with a skeptical eye. Big Bang and modern cosmology presently follows George Gamow’s assumptions as fact and stars follow Arthur Eddington’s turnkey stellar solution. Our misunderstanding of the stars is largely based on these two misconceptions. Big bang, Gamow, Eddington were all very close but incorrect.
I’ve been writing a paper on this topic for a year and should be finished soon. My paper goes from big bang to second generation stars and solar systems like ours. I form all the planets down to the surface features of Earth but it has taken forever to write. Covers a lot of ground. To cap it off I was not a staunch believer before the paper. The piece is called a universe in pieces: seeing stars.
Being an amateur, I enjoy the luxury of entertaining claims like yours. But also, being an amateur, I may not be the most competent person to support or critique them. I’ve looked into lots of papers like yours, a few by famous physicists who are seen by colleagues as having gone off the deep end. The one thing I can say about unconventional theories is that the body of known phenomena is quite constraining for the unconventional candidate theories
In your particular case, I don’t feel I need to bother. Your rather obvious & elementary error in your initial post told me enough. While I’m as near the bottom of the totem pole as a science reader or student can be, I could possibly alert someone higher up. I think, though, you’ll just have to do it yourself. Good luck!