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by sevensor 3585 days ago
Every time I try to comprehend the sun as it actually is -- its size and composition -- I end up completely boggled and unnerved. A vast and uncaring ball of plasma, mostly hydrogen, supporting billions of years of fusion reactions, so big that the orbit of the planet I live on causes only the slightest wobble in its position; it's no wonder the ancients worshiped the sun. There's nothing about it I can begin to grasp except by analogy.
1 comments

Ill just leave THIS here for you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNDao7m41M

Thanks to you, and to the GP. I do enjoy the analogies! I think the absolutely brain-crushing thing about objects of astronomic magnitude is trying to reverse the log-transform we use to make sense of them. For me it produces a sense of vertigo, like standing at the top of a cliff.
Okay. . . (humbly slinks away with tail between his legs)
that video totally blows my mind, i must have watched it a dozen times.
Yeah, it's pretty damn epic.