this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
80 points (97.6% liked)
Showerthoughts
33393 readers
1766 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What do you mean if? We've been doing that for years, and so far as I understand it, the only reason that we haven't found any is that there are millions of solar systems to check.
But we can't see planet surfaces yet. The most we have achieved is seeing a dark smudge in front of a light smudge.
Most planets are detected either by the star wobbling a little due to the planet pulling on it through gravity. Think a light smudge going a pixel to the left and then a pixel to the right.
Or by detecting a star getting slightly darker when a planet passes in front of it. This lets us guess the composition of the atmosphere when we filter the star light through a prisma and analyse which wavelengths of light we have a smidgen less of.
It's amazing what we can do. But we're still a far way away from actually seeing extrasolar planets.
We've actually gotten relatively clear pictures of exoplanets fairly recently. They're still blobs, but now they have color!