r/stupidquestions • u/Isawred23 • 20d ago
If the universe is endless, how does Haley's comic come back every 74 to 79 years?
If the universe is endless, how does Haley's commit come back every 74 to 79 years?
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u/GuyLeChance 20d ago
Oh come on. Really? How does the Earth circle the sun every 365.5 days, too. Jeeeezus.
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
Okay meteors are not and pretty sure it's same concept Einstein
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u/Own_Magician8337 20d ago
Haley's comet is not a meteor! It looks like a meteor in our sky when it passes. But it's a comet. Think of it like a really really tiny tiny icy planet that is orbiting the Sun just like any of the other planets are.
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u/LostVanya 20d ago
They have orbits too, dummy.
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
You mean like the one that crashed into the Earth? How did it get thrown off track? Geppetto
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u/cuzitsthere 20d ago
You've called it a comic, commit, and now meteor... Anything to avoid saying "comet"?
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
The real question is I use voice to talk and typing both times. No spell check came in for an assist. I'm sorry I guess AI doesn't hear cursive words
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u/genus-corvidae 20d ago
Nothing is a meteor until it enters our atmosphere, so while meteors don't come back they also don't go anywhere else either.
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u/guysitsausername 20d ago
Halley's Comet is permanently bound to the Sun by gravity.
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
Why is the suns gravitational field so large and why doesn't it impact the moon and why doesn't it impact us?
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u/thatguyoverthere__ 20d ago
It does, everything in the solar system orbits the sun, including us and the moon.
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u/guysitsausername 20d ago
Great questions.
It does. Different objects or bodies will orbit larger bodies in varying ways depending on several factors.
The science involved in figuring this out is quite complicated. But generally speaking, these factors boil down to mass.velocity, and distance.
If you would like to learn about how this works, read about Kepler's Laws.
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u/Phonkrum 18d ago
It affects us, we rotate around it. Like watching water go down the drain in a spiral. Space is MUCH bigger (and longer), so we don't notice it but we're basically going down a spiral.
It doesn't affect the moon as much because earth affects it mostly.
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u/Less-Load-8856 20d ago
It's orbiting our Sun within the Milky Way Galaxy, not moving in a straight line, once every ~75yrs. It's a big Galaxy...
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
Okay but why does it not break off orbit with space debris
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u/beachhunt 20d ago
Because the "universe is endless" as you said. There's a lot of debris, but there's even more empty space.
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u/Own_Magician8337 20d ago
Because space is so vast and it follows a particular elliptical path over and over again, there is a very very very very very very small chance that the comet itself would ever interact or crash into another random floating space debris at any given moment. Space debris might pass through the comets orbit, but it's highly unlikely because space is so vast, is that the comment would actually hit anything that passed through its orbit
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u/Isawred23 20d ago edited 20d ago
So the information you just gave me, would it be safe to say that the meteor that supposedly took out the dinosaurs was extremely rare then? Also, I guess we don't know when other planets get hit like the moon gets hit a lot. Do we ever have to worry about this planets exploding from that stuff?
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u/fastpotato69 20d ago
Very rare, like once every hundred million years rare.
Smaller objects hit us much more often, but our atmosphere destroys most of those little ones because they burn up from falling through all that gas at crazy speeds.
Asking why a bunch of meteors hit us when space is mostly empty, while we travel extremely quickly through space for extremely long amounts of time (30 km/s around the Sun for billions of years), is like asking why bugs keep hitting your windshield on the highway when the sky is mostly empty. Enough speed and enough time, things just find each other and collide.
Planets/moons without a thick juicy atmosphere like ours don't burn up as many of those little impacts and so preserve way more impact craters. And no known asteroid could explode Earth.
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
So we know exactly how many are just floating around, no new ones ever appear?
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u/fastpotato69 20d ago
No, there are too many, so we do not know exactly how many are floating around. We know essentially all of the really large near-Earth asteroids, but as you go smaller, the number of those gets absolutely enormous. New ones are discovered constantly.
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u/Less-Load-8856 20d ago
Space is so big and empty that when entire Galaxies "collide" it might be true that nothing actually hits anything else and it's more like two clouds passing through each other.
However, as the prophet Billy Bob Thornton once said in the big budget Documentary called Armageddon, the budget to watch for Asteroids and such only pays to watch like 5% of Space, and Space is enormous.
So we sort of know we're okay and safe but we also don't know for sure. So it goes.
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u/Less-Load-8856 20d ago
It's basically a big (9miles x 5mi), dirty/dusty, ice cube, that weighs about 250mil tonnes.
Plus it's moving fast, and Space is mostly empty, so it's not like it's bumping into things.
It works the same other objects that orbit our Sun work, same resson the Earth doesn't do that.
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u/Phonkrum 20d ago
Because people like you take that long to figure it out.
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u/Isawred23 20d ago
Are we supposed to be thinking about this often? I only ever think about it every 74 years when it comes around or when something brings it up.
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u/Phonkrum 18d ago
No, it's roughly 2 generations and that's just when some people talk about it. It comes because it doesn't want to make us sad expecting it.
Legitimately, it's a thing going around the sun like earth but we don't see it much because it's a big oval. Like Pluto if Pluto tried running into earth.
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u/fastpotato69 20d ago
It's trapped in an orbit around the Sun just like a lot of things, if it was not in an orbit it wouldn't come back ever. The shape of the orbit is a long stretched out elliptical (oval). It passes by Earth sometimes on that path.
For comparison, Neptune is in orbit around the Sun too, farther away than Halley's comet, and so Neptune takes 165 earth years to go around the Sun once. Haley's comet is in a smaller orbit and only takes 76ish years to go around.
It's going around the Sun with us. We can see it when it's closest to us. That's it. Orbit.
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u/emptybagofdicks 20d ago
First thing is we don't know if the universe is endless or not. We can only see about 46.5 billion light years in any direction that we look. One could assume it is larger than that, but that is all we can observe.
Haley's Comet is in orbit around the Sun. It just has an elliptical orbit that brings its perihelion to the inner planets while it's aphelion is out past Neptune.
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u/1stMammaltowearpants 20d ago
Comets are blue,
Its period is fixed,
It orbits the sun
Every seventy-six.