I’ve always thought that stars in the sky are well, stars. But I just started to wonder, that are they just other stars or can we also see planets and such with our naked eyes? Like can the star be so bright that it could reflect the light from the planet so we can see it with just our eyes? Or are they all just other stars like our sun?
In: Physics
Others allready made pretty good answers. I want to give a small visualization on why you won’t see planets outside of our solar system.
Put two objects next to each other, when you are next to them the distance between them seems huge. Now the further you get away the smaller the distance will seem. Now even if the planet would emit the same amount of light as the sun, they would still seem as one object since we are several lightyears away from them.
Sooooo let’s convert into something feasable shall we?
Let’s say we were one lightyear away from our solar system and would watch the earth and the sun.
If you scale the sun down to a tennis ball (~6cm diameter) you’d need to place a pinhead ~7m apart from it. And if that wasn’t hard enough, you’d have to move ~400km away from those and still be able to tell them apart.
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