Scale of universe

Despite all the work that scientists are putting into space exploration and research, and all that we've achieved and learned about our solar system, the general public's true understanding of all this is lacking, mostly due to how this information is communicated. It's hard for most people without backgrounds in science to really comprehend what it means when we send a probe past Jupiter, or how far away Eris really is. It's simply difficult to truly grasp the magnitude of our solar system and all it's celestial inhabitants, and the physical dimensions are so vast that rendering it visually has always been difficult to do accurately, leading to a lot of misunderstanding. Thus, OMG SPACE was created: series of various visuals that attempt to solve this problem as part of a graphic design thesis project. This project is only possible with the infinite scale of the web. To do this in print, one would have to sacrifice either distance or size in order to make it a feasible print job, which is why many textbooks unfortunately fail to illustrate the scale of the solar system accurately. All the planets on this website are to scale, including the sun and dwarf planets. The distances between each object and the sun are also to scale, and both the planets and relative distances are to scale with each other. Everything is calculated at a ratio of 1:647 to make easier numbers to work with and give me reasonable pixels sizes for this website. So if the Sun is 1,391,000 kilometers in ...

Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI Hi folks, tune in every week of 2023 for the best in astronomy from Astronomy Editor Dave Eicher, brought to you by Celestron. Dave’s weekly video series will cover all the latest sky events, scientific results, overviews of cosmic mysteries, and more! This week we’re talking about the distance scale of the cosmos. It’s absolutely amazing to know that shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was a relatively small, nearly infinitely dense place. It boggles the mind. But that was 13.8 billion years ago. The expanding universe means the entirety of what we know is now incredibly large — and is getting more immense every day. In science fiction, the idea that technology will know nearly no bounds, and that we will almost certainly one day travel between star systems, is pretty much taken on faith. But sci-fi movies fail to communicate that the universe is an immensely large place. Even distances between the nearest objects are staggering, and the distances across the Milky Way Galaxy and certainly between galaxies in the universe are astonishingly huge to living beings stuck on a planet. To visualize these distances yourself, you can check out the scale model detailed in