Scale of the universe

HTwins.net - The Scale of the Universe The Scale of the Universe You need a more recent version of Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn the scale of things along the way! Press left or right or drag the scroll bar to zoom in and out. Press down to toggle quality.

You've now reached the outer edges of our own solar system It would take you about 23 million years of continuous scrolling on this scale to get to the farthest regions of the observable universe, another 435,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km or 46 billion light years away. We think we'll stop here. Live long and prosper Everything in space is moving constantly, and distances are variable and dynamic over wide ranges. Data are rounded to a maximum of 3 significant figures. In most cases, we have given average distances for simplicity's sake. For planets, we have given minimum distances - the closest the planets come to Earth over the course of their orbits. Other distances (termination shock, heliopause) are uncertain and estimates are given. Some distances, particularly the location of probes and other man-made spacecraft, are based on time-specific readings taken in February 2014. Travel times are based on travelling in a straight line - spacecraft rarely do this in practice. Asteroid and comet measurements are diameters. Distances are from Earth’s surface. Object sizes are not to scale.

Think about this for a second; it takes us around three days to reach the Moon , approximately seven months to get the closest planet to us, namely Mars , 15 months to reach Venus , six years to reach Jupiter , seven to reach Saturn , 8.5 years to reach Uranus , 9.5 years to reach Pluto – the closest dwarf planet , and twelve years to get to Neptune , the farthest planet. The Sun is 0.00001581 light-years away, and in the best-case scenario, we could reach it in 25 days. So how big is the Universe ? Its around 93 billion light-years. How much is that? Well, let’s think about the Sun again. The Sun is one astronomical unit (AU) away from us. One astronomical unit is 149,598,000 km / 92,955,887 miles, and in our top shape, we could reach it in 25 days. Now, the Universe is 93 billion light-years across, and one, just one light-year, is equivalent to 63,000 astronomical units. As such, one light-year is the equivalent to 9 trillion kilometers / 6 trillion miles, and our Universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter. That’s how big our Universe is, and that’s not even the end of it. The 93 billion years is just the observable Universe, the Universe, which we can currently see. The whole Universe might very well be 250 times larger than the observable Universe, or at least 7 trillion light-years in diameter. Why is the Universe so Big? The Universe is so big because it is constantly expanding, and it does so at a speed that even exceeds the speed of light. Space itself is actu...

I haven’t told anyone this before, but I actually live in the fun room. I just gave you a tour of my house, where I spend a large portion of my life thinking about the size of things. I have visitors in the fun room from time to time, but after a few minutes, they’re usually pretty funned out and leave me to my crises. But one day, something unexpected happened. It was 2013. Wait But Why was a few months old. And I got an email from someone named Philipp Dettmer. I was slightly unsettled by the pp and tt, but I decided to read what he had to say. He explained that he lives in Germany where he makes animated educational videos about a lot of different things, kind of like Wait But Why but a different medium. I took a look at his YouTube page. It was named a random string of letters: kurzgesagt Apparently it means “In a Nutshell” in German, but I didn’t know that at the time and was very close to being done with Philipp Dettmer for good when I decided to watch one of the videos. It was delightful. I watched another. And another. And then it hit me. Philipp—this random man in Germany— also lives in the fun room. The next day, we were on the phone. There was a lot to talk about. We decided we had to do something together, and we settled on adapting In the seven years since then, Philipp and I have become great friends, and I have not missed a kurzgesagt video since. Whenever Philipp and I get dinner, we head straight to the fun room to talk about the universe. And a few months...