Size Comparisons of the Largest Objects in the Known Universe
Scale representation of comet 67P compared to LA by Matt Wang
Here’s How Big Our Cities Really Are.
Los Angeles seems like a relatively big town. In fact, it is the
second largest city in the United States. The area spans 502 square
miles (1,300 sq km), and some 4 million people calling this place
“home.” However, L.A. is dwarfed by even the smallest objects in our
solar system. Recently, for the first time ever, humanity landed a probe on a comet. The comet is known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (or 67P, for short). The journey to this icy body took nearly a decade. Here, Matt Wang compares the size of the comet to downtown Los Angeles. As you can see L.A. is rather smallish by comparison.
This is home.
To the everyday individual, our planet probably seems like a rather
large place. At the equator, the circumference of Earth is 24,902 miles
(40,075 km). And ultimately, this Pale Blue Dot houses all the known
life in the universe. That’s 8.7 million species (give or take a few
million) and some 7 billion people.
NASA Image of Earth via Wikimedia Commons
This is How Big Our Planet Really is.
This is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
It is a massive storm system that has existed for hundreds of years.
Ultimately, it is 12,400 miles long and 7,500 miles wide (20,000 km by
12,000 km). So saying that you’ll be blown away by this storm is an
understatement of epic proportions. Our entire planet would be blown
away. Even at its smallest, this storm could easily swallow two to three
Earths. 1,300 Earths could fit inside the planet itself.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot compared to Earth. Image Credit: Michael Carroll
Here’s Our Planet Compared to Our Star.
Solar Flares are marvelous (and utterly terrifying) solar events. Generally referred to as “solar storms,”
these phenomena can release energy that is equivalent to over a million
100-megaton hydrogen bombs. If you look at the image above, you’ll get a
pretty good idea of what this means. Here, we see a NASA rendition of
Earth compared to a solar flare. Fortunately, as the material is ejected
from the Sun, it is dispersed across the solar system by stellar winds
(so we don’t get anywhere near a direct blast).
Earth compared to the Sun. Image credit: NASA
This is our Sun’s Sphere of Influence.
Our Sun is amazingly powerful. In fact, it is so powerful, it is able
to influence objects that are literally light-years away. To break this
down a bit, the Earth is just about 152 million km from the Sun (about
96 million mi). The Oort cloud
is one of the most distant structures that our star dominates, and it
is a staggering 4.6 trillion miles (7.4 trillion km) from the Sun. If
that’s not enough, it is believed to extend much, much farther than this
into space, ultimately make it light-years from the Sun. This portion
of our neighborhood is nearly a quarter of the distance to Proxima
Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun (which gives you some idea of just
how far the Sun’s influence extends). Some scientists even believe that
you could travel half way to Proxima Centauri before you truly leave
the Sun’s sphere of influence, meaning that you would have to
essentially travel to the next star in order to leave our solar system.
A diagram showing the many layers of our solar system, including the mysterious Oort Cloud (via NASA)
This is Our Sun Compared to Truly Massive Stars.
VY Canis Majoris
is one of the largest stars in our galaxy. Yes, “one of.” Ultimately,
Canis Majoris isn’t the largest star that we’ve ever discovered. When it
was first discovered some 200 years ago, we thought that it was
actually two stars orbiting together in a binary system. Ultimately,
this star is so large, if it were placed at the center of our solar
system, it would extend beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
A comparison between the hypergiant, our sun and Earth’s orbit. (Credit: WikiMedia)
And Here’s a Black Hole Compared to Our Solar System.
OJ287 is one of the largest black holes in the known universe. If it
were placed at the center of our solar system, its event horizon would
swallow nearly everything is our Sun’s sphere of influence. All the
planets, the asteroid belt, and (obviously) us. This beast is an
estimated 18 billion solar masses and drifts through the cosmos some .
Oj 287, one of the largest black holes in the known universe. Image by Jaime Trosper/FQTQ
Here’s Another Way to See how Large Black Holes are.
The Largest Known Galaxy Compared to the Milky Way
Shown in this image is IC 1101: The single largest galaxy that has
ever been found in the observable universe. It is located almost a
billion light-years away. Just how large is it? At its largest point, this galaxy extends about 2 million light-years from its core, and
it has a mass of about 100-trillion stars. To give you some idea of
what this means, the Milky Way is just 100,000 light-years in diameter,
and IC 1101 is 2000x as massive. If our galaxy were to be replaced with
this super-giant, it would swallow up both Magellanic clouds, the
Andromeda galaxy, the Triangulum galaxy, and almost all the space in
between. That is simply staggering.
This is The Observable Universe.
This is, well… everything. Everything we can see and observe anyway. What you’re looking at is a map of known galaxies and superclusters in the “observable”
universe, with the gaps that lie between the structures contributing to
the map’s cell-like structure. These gaps, or voids, are regions of
space completely lacking in stars, galaxies, and clusters. The largest
of these gaps (the Eridanus supervoid) is almost one billion light-years in totality.
Via WikiMedia
This is the Total Size of the Universe (?)
As you can imagine, some confusion arises when one considers the fact
that the universe is not 13.8 billion light-years across—a number that
corresponds with the age of the universe (which is 13.8 billion years
old). By current estimates, it’s quite a bit larger, measuring in at a
staggering size of 93 billion light-years across. And that’s just what
we can see. What we can’t see may go on forever.
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