This is the Earth! This is where you live.
And this is where you live in your neighbourhood, the solar system.
Here’s the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the moon. Doesn’t look too far, does it?
THINK AGAIN. Inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, nice and neatly.
And here’s the size of Earth (well, six Earths) compared with Saturn:
And just for good measure, here’s what Saturn’s rings would look like if they were around Earth:
This right here is a comet. We just landed a probe on one of those bad boys. Here’s what one looks like compared with Los Angeles:
But that’s nothing compared to our sun. Just remember:
Here’s you from Mars:
Here’s you from just behind Saturn’s rings:
And here’s you from just beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles away.
Let’s step back a bit. Here’s the size of Earth compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying, right?
And here’s that same sun from the surface of Mars:
But that’s nothing. Again, as Carl once mused, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth:
Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than little wimpy sun. Just look at how tiny and insignificant our sun is:
But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact, if you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:
That’s because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:
But this is all you ever see:
But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. Here’s the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth:
But let’s think bigger. In JUST this picture taken by the Hubble telescope, there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, each containing millions of stars, each with their own planets.
And just keep this in mind — that’s a picture of a very small, small part of the universe. It’s just an insignificant fraction of the night sky.
And, you know, it’s pretty safe to assume that there are some black holes out there. Here’s the size of a black hole compared with Earth’s orbit, just to terrify you:
So if you’re ever feeling upset about your favourite show being cancelled or the fact that they play Christmas music way too early — just remember...
This is your home.
This is what happens when you zoom out from your home to your solar system.
And this is what happens when you zoom out farther...
And farther...
Keep going...
Just a little bit farther...
Almost there...
And here it is. Here’s everything in the observable universe, and here’s your place in it. Just a tiny little ant in a giant jar.
