Lesson number two; atoms & gravity - the cause of your obesity problem.Istalris wrote:Time for science! Lesson number one; atoms.
If you took an atom of matter, and inflated it so that it had a diameter of 1 kilometer, keeping all the scaling accurate, the atomic nucleus would be the size of a marble, sitting in the center of that giant 1 kilometer sphere. The atom's electrons would then be the size of tiny specs of dust, orbiting on the outer edge of the sphere hundreds of meters from the marble-sized atomic nucleus.
This means, as mind boggling as it is when you really think about it, every single piece of matter in the world around you is really just 99.9999% empty space. You are 99.9999% empty space.
Now we know that all matter is almost entirely empty space, there are a few awesome and quite frankly unimaginable exceptions. The more massive (density, not size!) a piece of matter gets, the less empty space comprises it's total atomic area. All the atoms on Earth, even the most heavy ones, are still almost all empty space, but there are a few types of exotic matter in the universe that are so heavy they defy belief.
The most extreme case of this outside of a black hole is what scientists call a neutron star, or "pulsar". These stellar corpses are formed after the violent collapse of a star several times the mass of our sun, and contain around the same mass as our sun, inside a sphere the size of an average Earth city. The matter inside a neutron star is under so much extreme stress, it has not only squashed out literally every micrometer of empty space, but also destroyed regular atomic structures, breaking everything down into it's subatomic constituents - neutrons.
Some cool facts about neutron stars:
- If you were to take a human and squash him down so that he were as dense as neutron star matter, every single human on the planet would comfortably fit inside a sugar cube sized piece. If you were then to drop that sugar cube sized piece of neutron matter to the ground, it would be so dense it slices right through the Earth like a knife through butter.
- If you were to jump from the height of your average car roof, on the surface of a pulsar, by the time you reached the ground, you would be travelling at 4,000,000 miles per hour.
- Any matter that falls onto a neutron star is accelerated to incredible speeds by the intense gravity, the force of it's impact would rip it apart into it's subatomic particles - effectively any matter that falls onto a neutron star, becomes more neutron star matter.
- You could climb up and down Mount Everest 100,000 times with the energy it takes to climb a single centimeter on the surface of a neutron star.
- The escape velocity of Earth is around 11.5 km/s, by comparison the escape velocity of the more massive pulsars is around 150,000 km/s - over half the speed of light.
- The intense magnetic forces within a neutron star make it prone to starquakes, not dissimilar to our own earthquakes, though the release of radiation and energy from a pulsar starquake would be sufficient to wipe out all life on Earth should it ever occur within a 10 light-year distance.
- When two neutron stars collide, the resultant mass is so dense it literally becomes a black hole.
- Most neutron stars rotate on their axis (i.e "one day") between 30-50 times every second. This means one day on your average pulsar lasts just 0.03 seconds. Some of the more extreme neutron stars can rotate up to 700-800 times per second.
