There is where you live and this is where you live in your neighborhood, the solar system. Here is the distance between the earth and the moon. Does not look so far, does it?
Think again. At their further point. The earth and the moon are 252,088 miles away. Inside that distance you could fit every planet. In our entire solar system. But let us talk about the planets. The great red spot on Jupiter, that about two times as big as earth and Saturn is about nine times wider than earth. Saturn's rings are so large that a few fragments within them are as large as mountains. But that is nothing to compare to our sun. Just remember this is earth and this is earth from the moon. And this is earth from Mars.
Here earth from just behind Saturn's rings and here earth from just beyond Neptune, four billion miles away. But the billions is a big number, so let us put that in perspective. One million second equals about 11 and a half days,
Whereas, one billion second equals over 31 years. Let us step back a bit. Here the size of earth compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying right. And here's that exact same sun from the surface of the Mars.
As Carl Sagan once mused.
The total number of stars in our universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet earth, and there are some stars out there. That are much. Much bigger than our little wimpy sun, the biggest star we know of. VP, Cains, Major is, is about 2,000 times the diameter of our sun.
But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact, if you shrink the size of our solar system down to the size of a quarter and shrink the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the diameter of a Milky Way would be roughly the size of the United States.
That's because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. It's diameter about 100,0000 light years wide, Which when convert to miles is about 621,371,192,237,333,890 miles. Inside all of that is you.
You live in this tiny. Tiny portion of the Milky Way. But even still, Our galaxy is a little runt compare with the same others.
A spiral galaxy is similar to our own, is twice as wide as the Milky Way, stretching over 200,000 light years across. It's massive. Let us think bigger. In this picture alone. Taken by the Hubble telescope. There are a thousand and thousands of galaxies. Each containing Millions or Billions of stars with their own planets.
Some objects seen here may have formed as many as 11 Billions years ago. Just Three Billions year's after the big bang.
The period of this time considered one of the busiest star forming period. And just keep this in mind, that's a picture of a very small. Small part of the universe.
A product of scientific phenomena and sheer chance. This blue speck in space holds the past, present, and future, of our very existence. Approximately 4.5 billion years ago, the earth formed from particles left over from the creation of our sun.
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