The Scale of The Universe 2

How big is the Universe? (click the image to see)

Douglas Adams said that if you think the road to the pharmacy is a long distance you should know that it is a breeze compared to the scale of the Universe. He was right. The universe is huge, but it has an edge. Woody Allen was happy about the edges of the universe, because he knew that if he would have lost something, you would find it eventually.

Actually, our Earth is really big. 40,000 km at the equator, but this is not much compared to the distance to the moon, 384,000 km or nothing compared to that to the Sun: 150,000,000 km.

Earth is very close to our Sun. Pluto, for example, is at a distance of 40 times greater. Again, distances in the solar system are very small compared with those of other stars.

The closest star, Proxima Centauri, is at a distance of 260,000 times the Earth-Sun distance, or one hundred million higher than Earth-Moon distance. And Sun and Proxima Centauri are only two certain stars. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, are about two hundred billion of these stars. And our galaxy is a normal galaxy. There are billion galaxies, each consisting of billions of stars in the universe that we see. And we can see only a small part of the universe, because of expansion and the limited speed of light.



Well, we still have much to explore, but first we need to invent the Star Trek warp propulsion.