This is earth! This where you live
And this where you live n your neighborhood, the solar system
Here's the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the moon. Doesn't look too far, does it?
THINK AGAIN. Inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, nice and neatly
But let's talk about planets, shall we? That little green smudge is North America on Jupiter.
And here's the size of the Earth (well, six Earths) compared to Saturn
And just for good measure, here's what Saturn's rings would look like if they were around the earth
This right here is a comet. NASA just landed a probe on one of those bad boys. Here's what one looks like compared to Los Angeles
But that's nothing compared to our Sun. just remember that:
Here's you from the moon
And here's you from Mars
Here's you from just behind Saturn's rings
And here’s you from just beyond Neptune, 4
billion miles away.
(To paraphrase Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have
ever known exists on that little speck.)
billion miles away.
(To paraphrase Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have
ever known exists on that little speck.)
Let’s step back a bit. Here’s the size of Earth
compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying,
right?
(The Sun doesn't even fit in the image).
compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying,
right?
(The Sun doesn't even fit in the image).
And here’s that same sun from the surface of
Mars:
Mars:
But that’s nothing. Again, as Carl once mused,
there are more stars in space than there are
grains of sand on every beach on Earth:
there are more stars in space than there are
grains of sand on every beach on Earth:
Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than little wimpy sun. Just look at how tiny and insignificant our sun is: (Our Sun probably gets its lunch money stolen)
Here’s another look. The biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, is 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun:
But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact, if you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:
But that’s because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:
But this is all you ever see: (That's not the milky way, but you get the idea)
But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. Here’s the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth: (Just think about all that could be there)