The Humongous Universe

[DR]

Even when you scale down the size of the Universe it is still uncomprehendingly huge. For instance if the Sun were the size of a marble the Earth would be invisible to the naked eye. and the edge of the Universe would still be over 2.2 quintillion miles or 2,200,000,000,000,000,000 miles or if you prefer 367 light years away more or less.

Light goes around the Earth 7 times in 1 second. In that same second, light would have traveled only one sixtieth of the Sun's circumference or one time in 15 seconds.

It will take 8 minutes to reach the Earth, and a couple of hours to reach Saturn. A year will be required for it to leave the Solar System and 4 years to reach the nearest star Alpha Centauri.

100,000 years will be needed to cross the Galaxy, and 2 1/2 million years to the next major galaxy. Needless to say this is a huge number already and we ain't even started yet.

Let's see, a light year is 6 trillion miles so we multiply 6,000,000,000,000 times 2,500,000 and that gives us 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles or if you want a name it is 15 Quintillion miles.

After all these unimaginable numbers we have yet to scratch the surface having another 13.675 billion light years to go; and you may just as well call it 13.7 billion light years. So on the scale of things we haven't even moved enough to chart it.



Above is a 600,000 million light year slice of the Universe. The Milky Way; our Galaxy is not even discernible at this large scale. It is at the center of this chart because we are observing it from there. If you took this image from a different Galaxy regardless of which one you would still be at the center.

These are the nearby Galactic Clusters pictured here. Each one of the dots in this picture is a Galaxy or two. Below we have the picture of the entire visible Universe.




An estimated 150,000,000,000 Galaxies reside within the visible Universe.

Here is another chart I made for you showing time, and space. The guys at NASA did the art work. I filled in the annotations.


For a larger and complete view click here

[TOvA~]

That is simply incomprehensible to me. I cannot get my head around the math at all!
But I love having the diagrams... that is really helpful Doc!

I wanted to ask you... so planets are closer to us than stars?

[DR]

There is no simple answer to that question any longer. The planets in our Solar System are WAY closer to us than all of the Stars in the Universe Except the Sun. The Sun is the closest Star to us and can be at times closer to us than any planet depending on where we are, or where the other planets are in their orbits.

If we line up all the planets in our system on the same side of the Sun then Mercury, Venus, and Mars are closer to us than the Sun. But if they are on the other side of the Sun in their orbits obviously they are farther away than the Sun.

Now if we exclude our Sun as the nearest star then all of the planets in our Solar System are by far much, much closer to us than the nearest star Alpha Centauri which is 4.5 light years or 27,000,000,000,000 [27 trillion] miles away as opposed to the farthest that Neptune could be at its maximum distance of around 7.4 light hours away, or around 5,000,000,000 + [5 billion+] miles more or less, mostly more. lol

So if Neptune were as far away as it could be then at the speed of light [186,000 miles/second] we could travel there in a normal 8hr shift. But to go to the nearest star Alpha C. we would need 4 1/2 years for that trip.

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