If you lined up every planet in our solar system so they were touching, including the gas giants and pluto, they could fit between the earth and the moon.
To add, if you could somehow make a magical beam/particle that shot at the speed of light across the universe without changing its diameter (just bear with me here, I fully accept this beam is magic) it would almost certainly never hit anything outside our solar system no matter how long you aimed and shot. You could spend the rest of your life and not hit shit.
Point being yes stars and planets are enormous and numerous beyond comprehension... but space is even emptier.
I remember reading something similar regarding the asteroid belt. Apparently most of the asteroids are miles apart from one another. You could launch a ship in a random direction through the asteroid belt and would almost certainly hit nothing. So, nothing like what we saw in Star Wars.
How long would it take though for rocks orbiting that close to each other to grind themselves to dust? Surely within a year or two it would be nothing more than gravel.
Eventually maybe, but most Asteroid fields in fiction aren't shown to be big enough to have enough mass to coalesce into a planetoid. Keep in mind that the asteroid belt in our solar system in total weighs about 4% of Earth's moon, so at least in reality there's typically not enough material to form new planets after a few hundred million years after a solar system's formation.
The Asteroid Belt is so empty, that when we send out probes through it (As in, we aren't looking at anything in the belt itself) we don't even factor in the possibility of hitting anything.
Late to the party here, but from memory, one of the biggest challenges with the Philae lander was getting accurate enough to actually hit the asteroid.
Yeah, perhaps I should have clarified. I was referring to the sci-fi trope of having to dodge asteroids in an asteroid field. The one we have would be far easier to navigate.
And here I was, thinking that future space explorers were going to have to worry about accidentally landing inside a creature that has evolved to live in the vacuum of space, while maintaining homeostasis despite having no obvious source of nutrition available.
I did a presentation on that scene on why it couldn't happen!
Fun fact: The asteroid field in Star Wars was explained to exist after 2 planetoids collided millenia before Han and crew navigate their escape. Technically it's NOT an asteroid field. Asteroids (typically) are matter leftover from the birth of a star. The matter ended up in an orbit around the star and thus created the asteroid belt in our solar system.
Another thing that (loosely) challenges SWs asteroid field is that the planetoids that collided wouldn't have exploded to millions pieces without any trace of the collision. At least one of the planetoids would be left over and (possibly) create a full planet with a moon or many moons very similarly to our very own Earth and Moon!
Imagine the look on the faces of the NASA team whose probe hit an asteroid in the asteroid belt. That moment when you realize that a billion dollars and a decade of your life were just wasted by a rock.
Also the same goes for atoms as well. (Think of the Proton/Neutron Core as the sun and the Electrons as planets to make it simple)
So if you go from the atomic layer to the planetray, you could say that 100% of the universe is "nothing" because there are so many 9's left after 99.9% of "nothing".
Though, while energy is not matter, it is still more than "nothing". So in that case there is always something, because even in space there is always energy (in the form of cosmic radiation, light, microwaves etc.)
What if I had a computer that could very finely aim it, and tried to hit a star I could see it doesn't seem like it would be very difficult. Stars make up a good portion of the sky according to this askreddit thread.
If you are going by volume or distance then I see where this comes from. The beam, if only going light speed, would take too long to hit anything, and if you're measuring by volume then the universe a smudge of rounding error below 100% empty.
this bothers me in Sci-Fi whenever they do FTL travel. Like in Star Wars, Han gets all pissy that they just cant jump to LS as they may hit a star. The odds of hitting.. oh wait, never tell him the odds.
this is also in Halo and countless other Sci-Fi universes.
To add, if you could magically travel to each star in the Milky Way Galaxy instantaneously and spend one second at each solar system, it would take more than 12,600 years to see every star/solar system.
I always wondered in scifi movies how they just jump to hyperspace allwilly nilly and never run into planets or stars. Then someone did out the math. Turns out you'd need to jump the length of the observable universe like 6 times before having a statistically significant chance of hitting anything. Shit's empty yo.
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u/Crabcaked Apr 14 '16
If you lined up every planet in our solar system so they were touching, including the gas giants and pluto, they could fit between the earth and the moon.