We are so established in the bubbles of our social lives that often we forget how unimportant a few of the important things are when put versus the entire image. And while for some individuals this awareness might be soothing, that a spilled coffee, a lost task or a loss of a relationship is simply such a little portion of things occurring in deep space, for others the idea can be definitely frightening.
Why not take a better take a look at what’s out there and compare how huge the surrounding universe is compared to our little green world? See on your own simply how huge Jupiter is compared to The United States and Canada? Or how huge our sun is compared to the biggest observed star? Possibly you’ll need to pick up a 2nd and re-evaluate how you view whatever around you!
This is the Earth, a planet that we all currently live on
Image credits: NASA
And this is the solar system where our planet shares space with the other 7
Image credits: NASA
The planetary system is interesting, with a history of very little, not little bit, simply 4.568 billion years! It includes a single star (Sun, duh!), 8 worlds (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and 3 widely accepted dwarf worlds (Ceres, Pluto, Eris). Oh, and whatever in between, such as moons and asteroids and such. The system mass of the planetary system is 1.0014 solar masses (one solar mass is equal to roughly 2 × 1030 kg, do the computations) and most of the system’s mass remains in the Sun (99,86 %) with the staying bulk included in Jupiter.
This is how far away (to scale) the Moon is from the Earth which doesn’t seem as much
Image credits: Nickshanks
However, you can fit every planet in the solar system in that gap. Quite cool, huh?
Image credits: reddit
Jupiter is our giant of the solar system. It is so big that the entire continent of North America looks like a green speck on it
Image credits: John Brady/Astronomy Central
Jupiter is the biggest world in our planetary system. Called after the Roman god of sky and lightning, Jupiter is a world with a radius of 69,911 km (43,441 mi) and an area of 6.1419 × 1010 km2 (2.3714 × 1010 sq mi) which would be around 122 Earths. Now that’s impressive! Unlike worlds like Earth and Mars (that have rocky, terrestrial surfaces), Jupiter is a gas giant, indicating that it consists primarily of hydrogen and helium for which it is often called a stopped working star (since they consist of the exact same standard components of a star). When compared to the sun, the world looks like a meek little bubble as its mass is just one-thousandth that of the Sun, nevertheless, if you integrated the masses of the staying planetary system worlds, Jupiter would still be two-and-a-half times larger.
Another big body is Saturn. Here you can see how big it is compared to Earth (or 6 of them)
Image credits: John Brady/Astronomy Central
If Saturn’s rings were placed around Earth, here’s how they would look
Image credits: Ron Miller
Our observation of other objects in the universe have improved quite a bit, and these images of Pluto are a good example
Image credits: NASA
Ah, the heartbreak of a century, initially called a world and after that being removed of the title and reclassified as a dwarf. Despite the fact that it took place back in 2006, there are still individuals who are disturbed over the International Astronomical Union’s choice to specify the term ‘world’ which resulted in Pluto being left out. In timeless folklore, Pluto is the god of the afterlife and the ruler of the underworld. Regardless of it not being a world any longer, individuals still looked to reach it and in 2015 The New Horizons spacecraft ended up being the very first probe to carry out a flyby of Pluto. It took nearly a year for the spacecraft to return the gathered info, however, it was so worth it.
Here’s how an artist imagined Rosetta’s Comet (67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko) would look when compared to the size of downtown Los Angeles. Makes you think about those end-of-the-world movies, no?
Image credits: anosmicovni
Although none of the previous objects have substance compared to our sun, a yellow dwarf star
Image credits: ajamesmccarthy
Sitting at the center of our system, the Sun is an almost ideal sphere of hot plasma with an area of 6.09 × 1012 km2 which is 12,000 Earths (simply think of it for a moment!). It takes 8 minutes and 19 s for the light from the Sun to reach our world. The Sun is made from ~ 73% hydrogen with the rest being primarily helium (~ 25%) and just small quantities of much heavier aspects, consisting of oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron. According to Wikipedia, the Sun “presently merges about 600 million lots of hydrogen into helium every second, transforming 4 million lots of matter into energy every second as a result”. The energy (which can take 10,000– 170,000 years to leave from its core) is the source of Sun’s light and heat. When these procedures reduce, the Sun’s core will increase density and temperature level and the external layers will broaden, taking in the orbits of Mercury and Venus and rendering Earth uninhabitable. However that’s not going to occur in the upcoming 5 billion years or two, absolutely nothing to fret about!
This is how Earth looks from the surface of the Moon, not too bad?
Image credits: NASA/Bill Anders
Well, Mars gives a completely different perspective to our little planet
Image credits: NASA
And then there’s the view from behind Saturn’s rings, we seem like a planet for ants
Image credits: NASA
Around 2.9 billion miles away, just beyond Neptune, we seem smaller than a grain of salt
Image credits: NASA
So if that doesn’t put things into perspective, then let’s go big. This is how Earth looks when compared to the Sun
Image credits: John Brady/Astronomy Central
Though the Sun doesn’t look as bad when looking from the surface of Mars, right?
Image credits: NASA
There are so many stars in the universe that their number outweighs how many grains of sand there are on Earth’s beaches
Image credits: Sean O’Flaherty
Which means that our sun is just a grain of sand in the whole picture, especially compared to such giants like VY Canis Majoris
Image credits: Oona Räisänen
If VY Canis Majoris was placed in the center of our solar system, it would almost reach the orbit of Saturn
Image credits: Discovery Channel
If the Sun was scaled down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States
Image credits: NASA
So when you look at our galaxy from that perspective, our tiny Earth truly loses its sense of magnitude
Almost all individual stars we see at night scattered all across the sky are just a fraction of what lies out there
Image credits: ScienceDump
And if you thought that the Milky Way is huge, here it is next to IC 1101, which is 1.04 billion light-years away
Image credits: IC 1101
To top the overwhelming vastness of universe exemplified so far, here’s a photo of thousands of galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
Image credits: NASA
And here’s one of them, UDF 423, 7.7 billion light-years away
Image credits: NASA
What you see at night is just a small part of the universe
Image credits: NASA
And if you came here expecting black holes, here it is! This one’s compared to Earth’s orbit. Terrifying, isn’t it?
Image credits: D. Benningfield/K. Gebhardt/StarDate