16. Did you know that there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth?
17. And between all these stars, many are much bigger than our sun. Take a look at what it looks compared to VY Canis Majoris.
18. And galaxies are incredibly bigger. Just so you understand: if the sun was a blood cell, the Milky Way would be as big as the United States!
19. The Milky Way is enormous. Here is where we are inside it.
20. Thinking that all the stars we can see at night are just part of this yellow circle is mind blowing.
21. But don’t you ever think the Milky Way is the biggest galaxy in space. Here it is compared to Ic 1011!
22. This is a picture taken from the Hubble telescope. In just this space there are millions of galaxies, each and everyone of them containing million of stars, each with planets orbiting around them.
23. This is one of these galaxies, UDF 423. It’s 10 billion light years away. Do you know what this means? Its light takes 10 billion years to reach the Earth. Basically, by looking at this galaxy you are looking 10 billion years into the past!
24. Keep in mind that every single inch of your vision of the night sky contains billions of galaxies, stars, planets.
25. But it’s not all roses out there. Here is a black hole compared to our orbit. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that no particle or light ray entering that region can ever escape from it.
So whenever you think about your life and existence, about the good and bad in this world, keep in mind that we are just a tiny, little dot lost in space. Just a little recap. This is where we live.
This is what we look like in our solar system.
And in our interstellar neighborhood.
Our neighborhood compared to our galaxy.
And what it looks like from farther.
Let’s zoom out a little more.
Some more.
And here we are, here is the observable universe. Everything we said before fits in that little red dot. Impressive, right?
Thinking about how tiny and insignificant we are compared to the universe totally blew my mind. Share this with your friends!