How Large is the Universe? Bigger than you can Imagine?

how big is the universe why even ask or attempt to answer that question we're all living our lives in our own little bubble so why even think about something so abstract now i believe that we should explore and get a better understanding of the universe because it's about self-discovery learning more about the universe tells us more about ourselves because in essence it is us we are the universe we're not separate from it we are literally it as alan watts said we are an aperture through which the universe is exploring itself my intent with this video is to show you visually just how huge the universe is and also touch on what we can learn from that stick with me because however big you think the universe is it's bigger much much bigger the observable universe just the part we can see is 93 billion light years in diameter now when i say 93 billion light years in diameter that doesn't really mean much we know it's big but we can't really conceptualize a number that large large numbers are difficult to visualize so let's start with something we all know earth and then we'll work our way up from there our pale blue dot is bigger than most people give it credit for if you could drive around the entire earth at 60 miles per hour it would take just over 17 days to go around it or if you were to fly around it in a standard airliner it would take you just over two days so yeah this rocky dirt ball we call earth is pretty big it's taking humanity thousands of years to traverse the globe to develop it and to map it all out and those are all pretty recent accomplishments in the grand scheme of things zooming out from earth we'll eventually see the moon now we've all seen pictures like this in the upper left corner and it makes it seem like the earth and moon are pretty close but as the moon comes in from the right it becomes apparent that they are very far apart the moon is 238 000 miles away even a number this small is hard to conceptualize at least for me it is we all understand the speed of a car so we'll use that to show just how far away the moon is now imagine getting in your car and driving at 60 miles an hour for six months no sleeping or bathroom breaks either that's how long it would take to drive to the moon this moon this satellite that orbits the earth is the furthest humans have made it into space 12 people have walked on the moon and that's an amazing feat but really not very far when you consider what else is out there we have some probes and robots that have made it further but this is the furthest we as a species have made it we really are at the infancy stage of space exploration as we move out you'll see the orbits of other planets turn on now we've all seen graphics of the solar system that show the planets to be quite large and close together obviously this is done for practical purposes otherwise we wouldn't be able to see any detail the problem though just as is done with the earth and the moon in many cases is people assume that's what it's really like out there this really gives a false impression of the immense size of the solar system if you were to look at the solar system to scale from this distance this is what you would see nothing the planets are so small and the space so big you literally wouldn't see anything that's how small they are in comparison to the vastness of our solar system speaking of the planets here's a true scale of the planets compared to each other there is earth and there is our sun which you could fit 1 million earths inside of the average distance between the earth and sun is 93 million miles this distance is referred to as an astronomical unit how far is that if it were a road trip it would take 177 years to drive to the sun and if you're in a hurry you could get there in about 19 years by a commercial airliner what about driving to neptune how long would that take it would take 5 000 years by car and 600 years by plane so yeah the solar system is immense and i want to give you one more visual to really drive home how big the space is between the planets let's shrink the solar system down to the size of a football field at this scale our sun is just over one inch in diameter and sitting on the goal line the inner planets mercury venus earth and mars are smaller than the ball in a baltic pen and they're all within the first few yards the outer planets or the gas giants would be smaller than bb pellets and way way further down the field the solar system is huge and it's easy to see why we haven't made it very far there's a lot of empty space out there hope is not lost though we've sent several probes and robots into space and they can go much faster than a car or plane our furthest probe voyager 1 which you're seeing the path of here as an orange line was launched in 1977 and has been traveling for over 42 years it's going about 38 000 miles an hour and is now over 13 billion miles away it's the most distant man-made object in space it passed all the other planets orbits back in the 80s and it's still going voyager 1's official departure from the solar system occurred in august 2012. as we zoom out you may be wondering where the boundary of our solar system is great question and a bit tricky to answer some define the edge of the solar system using neptune's orbit which is 5.6 billion miles in diameter some use pluto's orbit others use the heliosphere and some others define the border of the solar system at the outer limits of the oor cloud that's the orange sphere you see here the oort cloud is made up of billions of comments basically dirt ice balls and they orbit the sun way way beyond the orbit of neptune so there are several ways to define the edge of the solar system in one where neptune is the outer boundary it takes light four hours to go from the sun to the edge of the solar system in the other scenario with the oor cloud it takes light over a year and a half to go from the sun to the edge of the solar system that's over 3000 times larger than neptune's orbit so quite a big difference between them for the sake of simplicity i'll be using neptune as the boundary of the solar system i mentioned a light year so let's touch on that briefly a light year is the distance that light travels in a year light travels at 186 000 miles per second here are the earth and moon to scale it takes like 1.3 seconds to get from the earth to the moon it would take you 6 months to drive that far and light is traveling that far in 1.3 seconds that's fast it's going 186 000 miles per second 11 million miles every minute 670 million miles every hour 16 billion miles every day and just about 6 trillion miles every year everything is so far away in space and we don't want to have to write down these huge numbers so we use the term light year to make it easier on us in terms of light speed we're just eight minutes from the sun that's how long it takes light to travel from the sun to the earth and neptune is four hours away in terms of light speed if i haven't said it enough let me say it one more time the solar system is really big which is really why we haven't made it too far just yet but when you compare our solar system to the milky way it's just ridiculously small as we zoom out in our journey you'll see the nearest star to us proxima centuri it's about 4.2 light years from the earth that's 25 trillion miles great huge numbers again let's simplify it a little if you scale down our solar system to the size of a quarter how many quarters or how many of our solar systems could you fit between us and the nearest star go ahead give it a guess 1 5 10. you could fit 4450 of our solar systems between us and the nearest star at this scale the nearest star is 350 feet away from our little quarter-sized solar system just to humor you it would take 47 million years to drive there or 5 million by plane if you're in a hurry now if you're going the speed of a space probe like voyager 1 which is traveling at 38 000 miles per hour it would take about 73 000 years to travel to the nearest star 4.2 light years away which isn't too bad but it's still over 2 500 generations so obviously we're not getting there until our technology improves there's sirius the brightest star in the night sky it's about 8 light years away here's our little neck of the woods about 16 light years from earth there are 52 star systems within this area but we can't see all of them because some of them are quite dim but you can see other far-off stars there's beetlejuice off in the distance some 645 light years away that star is a thousand times larger than our sun that's our interstellar neighborhood about 50 light years across with our current technology going the speed of voyager it would take almost a million years to travel across this region in space zooming out a bit more just beyond our interstellar neighborhood we get to the radio sphere this sphere represents the extent of all human broadcasts since about the time of world war ii when we became radio bright as a species at about 160 light years across this area is filled with approximately three to five thousand stars again not all are pictured here because only the brightest stars can actually be seen from this distance by the way you're seeing real data here real stars and their locations from a program called open space this is the digital universe and if you're interested in exploring it yourself please go check them out i'll link to their website below it's completely free as well as we get close to a thousand light years away which is just one percent the diameter of the milky way it becomes apparent that the milky way is larger than we can even imagine there are at least a hundred billion stars in the milky way that's a hundred thousand millions but big numbers kind of go in one ear and out the other when we hear the term a billion we don't visualize it we simply can't we just say yeah a billion that's like a lot it doesn't quite register so let's take a second to talk about big numbers to count to 1 000 would take 17 minutes to count to 1 million would take 12 days and to count to 1 billion would take 32 years if that doesn't do it for you let's try visually here are 100 stars 100 of those is 10 000. 100 of those is 1 million 1 million is a lot right but believe it or not it's not much compared to a billion it's just 1 1000 here is 100 million here is 1 billion and keep in mind that each small block is 1 million and finally 100 billion okay one last example we'll use distance this time if 15 feet were to represent 1 000 then 1 million would be 3 miles and 1 billion would be from cape canaveral to seattle oh and a trillion that would be 12 times further than from here to the moon i just want to stress this point so we can really appreciate what a huge number 100 billion is before we get deeper into this because the universe is about to get a whole lot bigger let's zoom out to the entire galaxy full of billions of stars remember that blue sphere that was 160 light years wide that's it that's the speed of light radiating from our planet in the form of radio waves for the last 80 years or so we haven't even made a dent some astronomers even believe there are as many as 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone that's absolutely mind-numbing the milky way is home to hundreds of billions of stars each one potentially having its own planets and possibly its own life forms in the last 20 to 30 years we've studied very small sections in the milky way and discovered that other stars have planets too based on this data scientists now believe that most of the stars in our milky way actually have a family of planets orbiting them by extrapolating this data that means there are billions of other planets out there in our milky way alone the milky way is about 120 000 light years across and a thousand light years thick on average all right if that doesn't make much sense let's forget huge numbers for a second let's use another comparison to bring things down to a scale we can relate to let's go back to our solar system being shrunk down to the size of a quarter if our entire solar system was the size of a quarter our milky way galaxy would be about the size of north america i can't even find a quarter in my own couch and if you said to find one particular quarter in north america it would be pretty much impossible trying to see our solar system at this scale would be like trying to see a quarter from space now our sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in our milky way so imagine all of north america covered with billions of quarters the quarters representing star systems like ours at the center of each quarter is a tiny speck smaller than a speck of dust that represents a star at this scale our nearest star proxima century as mentioned earlier is 350 feet away so imagine if you will quarters scattered all over the place every few hundred feet all over north america that's pretty incredible here you can see the orbit of our sun around the galaxy even though the sun is traveling around the galaxy at over half a million miles per hour it still takes 225 million years to complete one revolution if you're still not impressed with the sheer magnitude of space let's move past our galaxy let's get serious the andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away zooming out even further to about 110 million light years we see the virgo super cluster there are thousands of galaxies here similar to ours with hundreds of billions of stars and planets as we continue to zoom out we see other super clusters that have been mapped out the dark region is called the zone of galactic observation because it is obscured by our own milky way and finally quasars come into the picture as we move past the cosmic background radiation left from the big bang we see the entire observable universe 93 billion light years across we may never know what's beyond the part of the universe that we can see but due to the acceleration of space it is believed that the universe itself is at least 250 times bigger than the observable universe wow a lot of information but what's the point what can we learn from all of this first can we all be honest with ourselves for a minute the truth is we know nothing pretending we have all the answers limits our open mindedness to what's really out there look at us floating around on our little dirt rock ball in the middle of nowhere it's great that we're able to see as deep and as far as we can into the universe but ultimately we know nothing we don't know why things happen the way they do more than likely whatever it is that is happening is happening for reasons that our little brains simply can't comprehend so the next time something happens that doesn't go your way just go with it man just go with the flow do you really think there's any point in resisting the universe also we don't have to know everything except that we don't have all the answers and enjoy life live the moment you're in do things you're passionate about and just have a good time while you're here second you are the universe eckhart tolle stated you are not in the universe you are the universe an intrinsic part of it ultimately you are not a person but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself what an amazing miracle obviously from our limited perspective at this moment being in our heads we feel quite separate from the universe but think about this every atom inside your body was once in a star when a star explodes it sends new materials and elements all over the place and that's where carbon metals and everything else comes from that in turn forms other stars and planets and the planets ultimately create you that's how you were made literally from star stuff it took billions of years for the universe to evolve and change and create us we're tiny but we're also exceptionally special as is everything in the cosmos here's my belief the universe is intelligent it's not just a bunch of dumb matter floating around colliding haphazardly one universal intelligence or one consciousness is what's guiding this whole thing including you we just feel like separate cells because that's how our limited minds work you didn't come into the universe as some separate thing you came out of the universe you were born from it ultimately you're not some separate thing you're the whole thing which means we're all in this together as neil degrasse tyson puts it we're all connected to each other biologically to the earth chemically to the rest of the universe atomically not only are we in the universe the universe is in us so do your best to treat everyone with love respect and dignity we need to stick together as a species and a planet if we're going to survive and i think we will i'll leave you with one final quote the cosmos is within us we are made of star stuff we are a way for the universe to know itself carl sagan if you stuck around for this entire video thank you i hope you enjoyed it please like and subscribe if you can and please drop me a comment and let me know what you think we can learn from the enormity of the universe i would love to see what you all think thanks and i'll see you next time [Music] you

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Views: 1,137,940

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Keywords: the universe, how big is the universe, space, galaxy, milky way, galaxies, the universe is big, universe is way bigger than you think, how large is the universe, fly through space, comparison

Id: m2YJ7aR25P0

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020