What come after Pluto?

Minnie comes after Micky

I would just stop at Uranus.

The edge of the solar system is undefined but there are several measures which astronomers count.

Beyond Neptune the are believed to be thousands of small rocky bodies which Pluto and Eris are the biggest. Beyond this is believed to be the Oort cloud from which comets exist. This stretches 1/3 of the way to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri)

The Suns influence ends at the heliopause which is well beyond Neptune but nowhere near the Oort cloud.

HTH Ovalman, Chit Chat's resident astronut.

If you can wait awhile Voyager 1, launched in 1977 and still functioning like a goodun, is on its way through the heliosheath on its way to the heliopause, and it's hoped it will still be working and be able to tell us something about the edge of the solar system. It's 10 billion miles from the sun, and has lasted considerably longer than the Ford Cortina.

TBF to a ford Cortina though, there's no rust in space.

Thanks for the info chaps. It will take some time for me to move these new found nuggets away from sexual innuendo (sheath, pause etc.) and convert it into advanced space knowledge. But I'll work on it throughout Strictly CD and get back :x

Badly hungover but am making a start on this. Just 30 seconds in and already I know that the Oort cloud is actually prounounced Ort.

WHY NOT JUST SPELL IT ORT THEN? FFS

Named after a Dutchman. Might have guessed. Was originally discovered by an Estonian called Opik, and so an Oort cloud is sometimes referred to as an Opik cloud. Very unfair this Oort guy muscling in on Opik's life work imo

An image that adequately shows how insignificant we are.


http://i34.tinypic.com/ea11qe.jpg

what if you go the opposite direction to mars and them other planets? what do you find then? ive often wondered this!

Sunburn

no no, the other way!

What's also very weird, jomo, is that the solar system is on a plane (of flat, disk-like), there doesn't seem to be much 'up' or 'down'. I have wondered why the orbits of the planets are not random. This is probably to do with the formation of the planets, from one long (cigar shape) trail of dust and other material which would have coalesced into the planets.

Also the effect of millions of years of gravitational tugging to get to where we are now.

mitt, have a look at this pic to illustrate...

http://api.ning.com/files/WA7dI9PkWcWpzxR*0CuvZ1AiuIKoTlik9IpN2axl0RAbeB7gcFGUCpfcQuGc6k1293dRYo0xwTea5G7sFmlUuCHhJAIHyFXa/Panel6SolarSystem.jpg


You mean if instead of going left (as you look at this) towards the Sun, or right towards Pluto, you go straight up or down?

Well I personally don't know, but I'd guess that the planets don't all have the same axis of lattitude (or is it longitude?) as commonly illustrated. We forget to think 3D?

Otherwise I'd say just space. Until you get to the Oort cloud.

Aha! So all the planets are actually on a flat disk - Our solar system a bit like a CD in other words?

yes, ..up or down.. those were the words i was looking for!

The Sun's effect (solar system) is in the area of a light year. It's 3.5(ish) light years to the nearest star. No other planetary systems have been conclusively discovered, but "wobbles" in the orbit of stars suggests the presence of planets. There are about 100 BILLION stars in our galaxy, the galaxy is about 70,000 light years across. Its about 1 million light years to the next nearest galaxy. There are at least 100 BIILLION galaxies, which are generally situated in clusters in a sort of helix formation, iirc.
It is theorised that we cannot see 90% of what is there as it's dark (dark matter) and not all stars.

the universe is massive, of course theres life out there

how do people know all this? seems like a bit of guess work.. 100 billion seems an amzingly convenient round number, for example!

It is indeed roughly flat, only Pluto deviates a little from the norm. Comets however come in from all angles which is why they believe the Oort cloud surrounds the Sun in 3 dimensions. Space is very big and very empty and "cloud" is probably not a good term. Distances between objects in the cloud are probably far bigger than the planets are separated.

Science on the outer reaches of the Solar System is still young. The Oort cloud is still speculation (although with good science behind it).

There's a few space telecopes being launched soon that will pick up these small bodies and we will know 100 times better in 5 years time.

It is completely mental. You realise how absolutely dicky bow we know about our world. I need to get the Quantum Leap box set to make any sense of life imo.

From the beginning, the Universe is everything, and is apparently 13.73 billion old, and the observable diameter is 93 billion light years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe

The Universe started through the Big Bang (the Planck eopch page could be worth a read, not for enlightenment purposes, but because "Planck time" seems quite a cool phrase)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_epoch

Anyway, our solar system is part of the milky way (the term often given to 'our' galaxy, which our solar system is in, yes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way

And there's billions of galaxies etc.

No no the world is flat and rides on the back of a turtle swimming in an ocean, that is all!!!

and created in six days - cor blimey!

with homebase stuff no doubt