When I look at a solar system drawing there are planets circling the sun and they look like they are in a straight line and level to each other. But is there a below and above? Like if we sent out a camera directly under earth (south pole) would there be planets, stars, etc below Earth?
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Yes and no. It all depends on where you set your center point and how you define “up” and how you define “down” from there. Just like how the only reason we think of the North Pole as being the “top” of the planet, the farthest point “up” you can travel, is because that became the common convention for defining the earth. It is practical.
Below and above on earth are defined by the direction things fall because of gravity. Unless you are in a gravitational pull from a planet, those terms don’t really have meaning. But yes, there are stars in every direction.
Not ones from our solar system but yes. If you can find the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor which should be close to the Big Dipper and you look at where the nose should be on the bear, you will find Polaris, which at least for now is the “North Star” for Earth, and essentially would be you looking directly up from our North Pole. Depending on what line of latitude you are on will determine at what angle above the horizon you see this star, the further north you are, the more directly above you it will be.
I’m not familiar with the stars in the Southern Hemisphere so maybe someone else will chime in on those.
large-scale structures tend to form disks over time. the solar system forms a disk, so if you went straight “down” from the south pole then no, you wouldn’t encounter any of our solar system’s planets.
the solar system is not necessarily oriented in the same way as the galaxy (which is also a disk), so if you went “down” from Earth’s south pole you would eventually exit the solar system and encounter other stars
Yes.
Above is whatever is over your head.
Below is whatever is beneath your feet.
You become the point of reference when there is no other body to be connected with that sucks you into its bubble of relativity.
On earth, “above” and “below” are defined by earth and its gravity. Then by our orientation.
In a space ship, you have references of “floor” and “ceiling”.
If just you are floating in space, you become the reference or may pick a reference, but there would be no difference in sensation or any meaningful discernment of some concrete “above” or “below” without first picking a center.
Pretty much everything in the solar system orbits the Sun on roughly the same plane, so it appears flat. There are elements of the solar system “above” and “below” this plane, like distant asteroids and comets, but generally it’s flat. This is due to the conservation of angular momentum and the way things have been rotating since the solar system was formed.
The galaxy is also “flat,” but it’s much larger and much thicker…about 1000 light-years thick. The solar system’s plane is also tilted with respect to the galaxy’s plane, so we see plenty of stars in every direction, even “up” and “down.”
The universe is more or less “spherical”, in the sense that it reaches out as far as we can see in every direction. There are galaxies everywhere.
You asked what we would see if we sent a camera “under” Earth. Earth itself is tilted with respect to the solar system’s plane, so something being “below” Earth doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “below” the solar system.
Lastly, of course, there is no “up” or “down” or “above” or “below” in space. These are terms which describe direction relative to something else, and there is no universal “something else” to refer to. If we say something is “below” the solar system, it could just as easily be described as being “above” it.
Yes, there are stars in all directions of Earth that’s why you can see stars in all directions in the night sky in both the northern and southern hemisphere
All the planets orbit in roughly the same plane because the sun spun its gas cloud out to be a thick disk and the planets form in there like the rings of Saturn so there aren’t planets significantly above or below the plane of the ecliptic (the plane that most things orbit on)
Planets orbit in close to the same plane around a star because of collision when the solar system is formed and because of gravitational interaction between them after they are formed. But all the orbital planes are not aligned in the galaxy, they are randomly distributed.
In a solar system, we define a plane as a reference and can have coordinates relative to it. You would define the plane so if you look at it from above plate orbit counterclockwise. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-hand_rule is used, curve you fingering the direction of rotation and the positive direction is the direction of your thumb. This is used all the time in math and physics, it is an arbitrary rule and you could do the same with the left hand but we did not pick that
The same way we can define a galactic up and down from a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_plane based on the general orbit of the solar system around it. It is not the same as our orbit around or the earth’s spin. You can see the milky way in the sky can be directly above you if you are 29 degrees south of the equator, it can be seen north of the equator too
So there are no planes that orbit far away from earth orbit around the sun. But there is stars in every direction, not the same amount there are more in the plane that the galactic core is in. Polaris which is close to directly above the north pole will be above used in the galactic plane so that direction contains fewer stars than toward the milky way
You can see a model of the milky way at https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/620057main_milkyway_full.jpg wit the solar system marked out. The galaxy is around 100,000 lightyears in diameter but only 1000 lightyears thick so quite a flat disc. There is a different amount of stars in a different direction just because of out location in it. If you are at the edge of a forest there are more trees in one direction compared to the other.
You will not see a huge difference with your naked eye because 75% of all starts you can see without any aid are within 500 light years. That is visible individual stars, not the milky way is millions of stars combined that is just a bright band in the sky
The orientation of the milky way is the same way not special in the universe and there is the same amount of galaxies in any direction away from ut.
A person in space relates up and down to the nearest source of gravity, normally the Earth, the reason why the planets are in the same approximate plane relates to the conservation of angular momentum and the formation of the protoplanetary disk https://youtu.be/Yhtr2hbg9Rs
Below and above are defined by whatever has the strongest gravitational pull on you at any given minute. Below is closer to it and above is further away from it. There’s no absolute below or above though – it’s always relative to your current position. To answer your second question, “below” Earth wouldn’t be pointing out form the south pole, it would be between Earth and the sun.
Our current maps and globes are only oriented with north on the top because the explorers and cartographers who first created them were on the northern hemisphere, using north-pointing compasses, so it made more sense to have their part of the world closer to the top to make it easier to read. There’s nothing inherently “up” about north, and nothing inherently “down” about south.
Edit: another confounding factor to make the up/down orientation of north/south even more arbitrary is that technically the north pole of the earth is magnetically south. I don’t know how the naming mixup happened.
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