Star Trek Voyager's IMPOSSIBLY Tiny Planet

so you're watching the positively amazing Star Trek Voyager opening in this breathtaking shot passes by it looks really cool but this planet is insane basically if this planet existed it'd be the weirdest planet known to man let me explain we see the USS Voyager flying above this impressive ring system we naturally associate a gaseous ringed planet with Saturn but notice that we can actually see a reflection of the starship on the Rings seems like a pretty inconsequential detail just an extra level of visual immersion but what it means is that we can definitively scale the entire planet by using USS Voyager as a measuring rod basically we now have a pretty good idea of the spatial relationship between the ship and the Rings by perspective matching the appropriate 3d shapes on to the scene we can now see just how far Voyager is from the ring system Voyager is 343 meters long and it appears to be flying roughly 128 meters or about 420 feet above the Rings that's surprisingly close actually but now that we've matched the reflection we know that we've scaled Voyager correctly from a top view we can now measure the width of the Rings the Rings are 2.6 kilometers or 1.6 miles wide with a total diameter of 13.4 kilometers so how can we measure the planet well now we have definitive scales for the Rings and for Voyager so earlier in the shot when we see the planet we can do the same three dimensional overlays and include the planet in our correctly scaled Rings switching to a top projection there's our planet and it appears to be 6.2 kilometers in diameter just under three point eight miles proportionally it's not that much different from Saturn but Saturn is about 120,000 kilometres in diameter that's seventy four thousand five hundred miles so if we scaled the Voyager planet correctly in this diagram it'd be less than a pixel large by comparison actually this planet isn't only small for a planet it's smaller than many asteroids there are many asteroids in our solar system that measure in the hundreds of kilometers wide and only the very largest asteroids have enough gravity to maintain a spherical shape like series at 946 kilometers and Vesta at 525 kilometers but at 6.2 kilometers how does our Voyager planets stack up against similarly sized objects in our solar system well the voyager planet is similar in size to asteroid Stein's which is 6.6 kilometres wide at its largest just over four miles spiracle planet with complex ring system lumpy asteroid but the same scale something seems up here after all this planet is only twice as wide as Manhattan the smallest object to have rings is Chiron which is 206 kilometers in diameter and is thought to have two rings but our planet at over 30 times smaller than Chiron has a complex and well-defined ring system with as many as 40 distinct ringless arranged into three possibly four ring groups in Saturn's rings its major ring groups correspond to specific shepherd moons that compete with Saturn's gravity over ring material forming gaps and the thousands of smaller ringlets are formed in much the same way based on this it can be assumed that this planet has as many as 40 moons orbiting it but that's using the word moon and somewhat liberally basically any object orbiting a larger object any planet with rings like this already has countless objects orbiting it that's why it has rings in the first place but a planet this small maintaining an orbital ecosystem this intricate seems very unlikely and that's not even mentioning the apparent atmosphere of this planet it looks a lot like the gas giants in our solar system with these horizontal bands of clouds but remember gas giants are giants in the possibility of this tiny little planet having a composition similar to a gas giant extremely unlikely maybe impossible these banded clouds are typical of gas giants and the different colored bands are caused by different types of gases at different altitudes now the different colored bands on gas giants appear flat because they're so huge but on an object so small we would clear be able to see the three-dimensionality of this planet's atmosphere so I guess our only recourse is that these features are not as they appear altogether this planet needs to have some really weird stuff going on to look this way complex rings a number of moons possibly a differentiated atmosphere all on a tiny little ball now I don't have all the answers I'm not an astrophysicist but I know it's suspicious planet when I see one it seems like this planet is impossible but I'm totally open to scenarios that would make this possible let me know your thoughts this video took a lot of reading but it was pretty fun to make and I learned a lot if you'd like to see more videos that explore Star Trek or sci-fi in general in this way let me know and maybe next time I'll actually collaborate with a professional to help give some more informative answers thanks for watching and feel free to share with your friends and I'll see you next time

Channel: EC Henry

Views: 732,306

Keywords: star trek voyager, voy, voyager opening, star trek voyager opening, star trek analysis, star trek theory, ringed planet, saturn, jupiter, astronomy, star trek astronomy, star trek planet, voyager

Id: xUiDc6pOfxw

Length: 5min 10sec (310 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2017