1. This is where you live, planet Earth, in comparison to the rest of our interplanetary neighborhood (our Solar System). Our Solar System is hurtling through space at a speed of approximately 70,000 kilometers an hour. I’ve even read estimates that this number can be up to 500,000 kilometers an hour. Zoom out and our Milky Way galaxy that is home to our Solar System (among what could be billions of others) is also hurdling through space at tremendous speeds. Keep zooming out from our galaxy into the cluster of galaxies that our galaxy calls home, and even beyond that, this cluster of galaxies is part of a super cluster. Need I say more? Note: There are visuals of this later in the article if you keep scrolling.
This a wonderful depiction of our solar system moving through space compared to the traditional flat diagrams.
2. The little green blurb you see on the screen there is North America. More than 1000 Earth’s could fit inside of Jupiter. In fact, all of the planets in our Solar System could fit inside of Jupiter.
3. Here is the size of six Earth’s in comparison to Saturn.
4. Now that you know everything you do from the above pictures, think about it, and then look at this. Here’s how big our Sun is compared to all of the planets in our Solar System.
5. Here’s a close-up shot of Earth next to our Sun. You could fit approximately 1.3 million Earth’s inside of our Sun.
6. This is how small our Sun is compared to some others out there that we’ve identified. VY Canis Majoris is approximately 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our Sun.
7. Some of these pictures are floating around various websites claiming that if the Sun was the size of a white blood cell and the Milky Way galaxy was adjusted to match that scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States. It’s not hard to believe, but this claim doesn’t come with a source. The best comparison I could find stated that if the Solar System (out to Neptune) were the size of a US quarter (25 mm), the Milky Way would have a diameter of 4000 kilometers, it would be the approximate size of the United States. (source)
8. This is the size of the Milky Way Galaxy (where our Solar System resides) compared to a few other known galaxies out there that are millions of light years away from Earth.
9. This picture puts the above picture into perspective. 1996 and 2004 were the years that the Hubble Space Telescope was able to take pictures of thousands upon thousands of visible galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars within each galaxy. Today, most scientists estimate our universe to be comprised of at least one hundred billion galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars within each one. Here is a short video regarding these pictures.
10. To conclude, number ten is comprised of multiple photos. This is our Solar System.
When you zoom out from that you get our Milky way galaxy which is comprised of billions of stars.
Zoom out even more and you get our galaxy that is surrounded by other near by galaxies.
Zoom out further and you get our neighboring galaxies (above picture) surrounded by other galaxies with their own neighboring galaxies. This is called the Virgo Supercluster.
And believe it or not, the Virgo Supercluster we belong to is surrounded by many other Superclusters.
Our Supercluster is surrounded by this… I will let you use your imagination if you want to continue zooming out….
Still
think that we are alone in the universe? Sure, it might be hard to
imagine that intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations have been
visiting our planet. At the same time it’s not, and a tremendous amount
of evidence now exists to support this idea.
“There is another way whether
it’s wormholes or warping space, there’s got to be a way to generate
energy so that you can pull it out of the vacuum, and the fact that
they’re here shows us that they found a way.” (source) – Jack Kasher, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Nebraska
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