The Size of Space

209 Seconds That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence. This is Earth! This is where you live. And this is where you live in our solar system (not to scale). Here is the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the Moon. Not that far, right? Inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, with about 4,392 km or 2,729 miles to spare. Jupiter is so large, this green smudge is North America. And here's the Earth (well, six Earths) compared with Saturn. But that's nothing compared to our Sun. Here's a photo of Earth from the Moon. And here's that same Earth from Mars. That insignificant dot there, that's Earth from around 4 billion miles away. Okay. So here's Earth compared to the Sun. Terrifying, right? Well, there are stars out there much, much bigger than our wimpy sun. Arcturus - over 16,000 times larger in volume than our sun. Alpha Scorpii A - About 690 million times larger in volume than our sun. VY Canis Majoris - about 2.9 billion times larger in volume than our sun (our sun is barely even visible at this scale). That's nuts, but it's nothing compared to the size of a galaxy. So the sun is just under 1,400,000 km wide. That's big, right? Well, our Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 LIGHT YEARS in diameter. That's roughly 950,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers. The Milky Way galaxy is huge. Here is where you live inside there. And in this yellow circle are the only stars you're able to see at night. But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. This is IC 1011, it is 6,000,000 LIGHT YEARS wide. Just think about all that could be inside there. But let's think bigger. The Hubble Telescope took this picture. It contains thousands of galaxies, each galaxy containing billions of stars, each star orbited by its own planets. And all of that was seen in this small patch of sky. So if you're ever feeling upset, just remember... this is your home. This is what happens when you zoom out. And farther out to the Solar Interstellar Neighborhood... and farther... keep going... just a little bit farther... almost there... Here it is. Everything in the observable universe. And here's your place in it. Oh, man.