Imagine a big, dark sky with shiny stars and planets where astronauts go on adventures.
In: Planetary Science
Mostly emptiness, really. Depends on where you are in space. If anything, we are in space. The planet is a giant spaceship
The final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship Enterprise …
Space, in my understanding, is basically the gaps between stars, planets, and moons, where the gravity of those celestial bodies has sucked everything it can out of it, be that solids, liquids or gasses. There’s no air because it all got pulled around planets with atmospheres or into the nearest star by their gravity.
It’s the natural state of things. We only consider our earthly environment “normal” because it’s all we’ve ever known, but in truth it’s just another (very unique, as far as we know) ball floating in space.
Everything else in space is just a complex dance of physics, chemistry, and the math that binds them.
Space is mostly nothing. Void, vacuum. It’s by far mostly made up of absolutely nothing, not even air.
There are occasional planets, stars, asteroids and odd particles here and there in space. Most of them formed an extremely long time ago.
We have a decent enough idea of what’s in space, but we’ve never gone physically further than our own moon. That’s because everything in space is *extremely* far away.
If you started walking east in a straight line at the equator, you’d have to walk 25,000 miles to get back to where you were and loop around the entire Earth. The moon is 240,000 miles away, or nearly 10x that. It takes a space craft about three days to get there.
Our nearest neighbouring planet, Mars, is 140,000,000 miles away. We’ve never visited.
Asking what space is, is like asking what New York is like while sitting in central ark.
You yourself are currently in space, just on or near the surface of a planet.
Most of space is different from the part of it we are currently in.
Most of space is empty.
There is nothing or very close to nothing there.
This means unlike down here, there is no air in most places and no place to stand on.
Occasionally in this vast emptiness you have stars. We just happen to be close to on: our sun.
Also there are a bunch of rocks big and small everywhere. We happen to stand on one.
Between the ground we stand on, the air we breath and the sun that shines on us, our little corner of space is atypical.
The best way to think of space is the visual void between celestial bodies. While technically not empty there is not a lot of vusibile matter there as it is either dark matter or elements and gases tgat are too dispurse and cold to be seen.
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Here on earth we think of space as that big, starry expanse that we see when we look up at night. In reality, just about everything is space. Matter in the universe mostly exists in balls and clouds of gas with the occasional rock orbiting around it, all spread out across mind-bogglingly great distances that we refer to as *Space*.
This website, [If the Moon Were a Pixel](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html), lets you take a trip from the Sun to the edge of our solar system as you cross the massive voids between each planet, all to scale. It will give a new appreciation of just how much *Space* is out there.
It isn’t anything.
If it was something, it would be…the thing it was. But it isn’t. It’s empty space.
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