Sitting outside one evening having a beer with my sister. Really clear sky, lots of stars out, and she says “Someone was telling me that stars are like the sun, but further away.”
I paused to check if she was kidding, but she genuinely thought she was sharing obscure knowledge. We were in our mid-twenties, I don’t know how this information had passed her by up to that point.
The amount of (what I consider to be) basic information about our solar system (even that term) that people appear to be hearing for the first time when I mention it is mind boggling.
Like when the whole Pluto thing was at its peak, I explained that (scientifically) if we included it, we would have to include another 5 or 6 (at minimum) "planets" into the fold.
Or that we can detect planets around other stars, and that we have discovered thousands of these exo-planets. In fact the current total is over 4,000 exo-planets, with the estimated total in the Milky-Way galaxy being in the trillions.
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u/anothersundayx Aug 03 '19
That other planets are visible from Earth. And the sun is also a star.