The Universe
If you've been working through the process, you've expanded your mind to the point that you have a bit of a grasp of the sheer size that objects can reach.
Now, let's put the size of our planet, our solar system, our galaxy and the Universe in perspective.
I've seen a lot of videos that try to put the size of the Universe in perspective. So far, I think this one from iMax does the best job of it:
100 billion galaxies. Each galaxy with 100 billion stars. These 100 billion galaxies span 20 billion light-years of space. These are numbers so huge that they're humanly impossible to write down with digits. We have to resort to words or scientific notation.
You might want to go back to "Visualizing Large Numbers" to remind yourself how huge one billion is. 10,000 billion is unimaginable - and that's just the number of stars in the universe. Then consider how many planets one star may have, and moons, and asteroids, and...
In the following 4 minute video we get to see some 3D video of what was seen after pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at two of the darkest sections of the sky, for 10 days.
We cannot really conceive how big the Universe is, much less how much matter it contains. These exercises only make us say, "Wow, that's a lot!"
What's even more incredible is the staggering amount of space there is between the galaxies, stars, planets and moons.
Our own moon is 250,000 miles away, or 10 times the circumference of the Earth.
You Are Here - click the photo for a larger image:
Dr. Jim