I really need to stop hanging out in astrophysics forums. I don't understand any of the math, and I probably seem like an excited child to them as I learn things for the first time that scientists have known for decades.
Anyway, do you want to know how small you are? Prepare to have you mind opened. This comes again from a user called RobotRollCall.
Take a look at this map:
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/wnearsc.gif
What do you think it is? A map of stars? Close. It's a map of galaxies. GALAXIES! Each dot is a galaxy, each galaxy has billions of stars, of which our sun is one small, boring example.
This is what RRC had to say about it:
"That one pixel right dead center? That's our galaxy. Our entire galaxy. If you want to imagine our planet at that scale, think of it as a single proton contained somewhere within that single pixel.
And this map? This just depicts the local neighborhood. It's just the stuff that's close. If you wanted to depict theentire observable universe at that scale, you'd need a map about ten feet across."
You think that's amazing? He came back a few minutes later to correct himself:
"Whoops. I was distracted and messed up the arithmetic. Our galaxy, on that map, is one one-thousandth of a pixel across, roughly. It's a thousand times smaller than what I described before, making our planet, by that scale, one one-thousandth of the diameter of a proton. And to depict the whole observable universe, you'd need a map roughly a quarter of a mile across."
At that scale, our earth is 1,000th the size of a single proton in your computer monitor. And everything we could possibly see, not everything in the universe, but everything we could ever hope to see, the observable universe, would be a quarter of a mile across at that scale!
Humans will probably never make it to the next star, let alone anywhere else in our galaxy and beyond. But when you look up at the sky and see those specs of light that you think are stars but are actually entire clusters of galaxies, a part of those places has come to you. Literally. The photons, the light, has traveled billions of light years through the frozen void, across vast oceans of time, has been bent by gravitational lensing around black holes, and is absorbed by your retina in the instant you look up into the sky.
I think that's amazing.
Anyway, do you want to know how small you are? Prepare to have you mind opened. This comes again from a user called RobotRollCall.
Take a look at this map:
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/wnearsc.gif
What do you think it is? A map of stars? Close. It's a map of galaxies. GALAXIES! Each dot is a galaxy, each galaxy has billions of stars, of which our sun is one small, boring example.
This is what RRC had to say about it:
"That one pixel right dead center? That's our galaxy. Our entire galaxy. If you want to imagine our planet at that scale, think of it as a single proton contained somewhere within that single pixel.
And this map? This just depicts the local neighborhood. It's just the stuff that's close. If you wanted to depict theentire observable universe at that scale, you'd need a map about ten feet across."
You think that's amazing? He came back a few minutes later to correct himself:
"Whoops. I was distracted and messed up the arithmetic. Our galaxy, on that map, is one one-thousandth of a pixel across, roughly. It's a thousand times smaller than what I described before, making our planet, by that scale, one one-thousandth of the diameter of a proton. And to depict the whole observable universe, you'd need a map roughly a quarter of a mile across."
At that scale, our earth is 1,000th the size of a single proton in your computer monitor. And everything we could possibly see, not everything in the universe, but everything we could ever hope to see, the observable universe, would be a quarter of a mile across at that scale!
Humans will probably never make it to the next star, let alone anywhere else in our galaxy and beyond. But when you look up at the sky and see those specs of light that you think are stars but are actually entire clusters of galaxies, a part of those places has come to you. Literally. The photons, the light, has traveled billions of light years through the frozen void, across vast oceans of time, has been bent by gravitational lensing around black holes, and is absorbed by your retina in the instant you look up into the sky.
I think that's amazing.
