You'll Feel Tiny Seeing True Size of the Universe

okay so let's assume this teeny weeny grain of sand just about .1 inches in diameter is our home planet earth trust me we're not even that big on a cosmic scale so i'm flattering us a lot you'll see anyway the moon will be just about here a little over two inches away and we'll have to find a grain of sand that's three times smaller than the first one it's hard to say if this is the one so let's again assume it is now what's the closest neighbor to earth apart from the moon that's right venus it's called our sister planet because it's roughly the same size and mass so this here grain of sand is gonna be it as for the distance we'll have to take a little walk now and there we go over 20 feet away from the grain that is the earth and that's at its closest mind you next comes mercury and it's more than twice as small as the earth so let's take a grain of salt this time for variety how far do you think it is from its neighbor venus not even close it's here almost 26 feet away if you've ever seen a london double-decker bus it's just short of that vehicle's length okay mercury is the closest planet to the sun so naturally here goes the big and mighty star measuring as huge as this rock it's roughly eight inches in diameter so it fits now where should i place it well you'd better take another double decker and then some because the sun's distance from mercury is 30 feet even further than venus and a walk from here to earth is quite a trip already all in all the distance is just short of that between two baseball bases cool huh but we've only just begun moving away from the sun next comes mars which is twice as small as the earth let it be a red pepper grain this time the distance to it though is even greater than from mercury to the sun over 33 feet so we'll place it here and now prepare for the real thing we're crossing the asteroid belt to reach jupiter to do that we'll need to travel about 275 feet that's almost the height of the statue of liberty and the planet itself is about the size of this grape just shy of one inch now let's take a smaller grape and fly another 330 feet that's how far saturn is from jupiter can you still see our rock i mean sun from here i don't think i can now if you take the golden gate bridge in california and decide to rise from its lowest to highest point that would be the distance from saturn to uranus the seventh planet in the solar system notice how distances grow larger every time that's far from over though meet neptune uranus's brother planet although they're neighbors it'll take us another 820 feet to get to it put five olympic sized pools in a line and you'll get the scale the former planet nine pluto is our next destination if we go straight from the sun it'll be yet another four olympic pools away and the size of it is only a speck of ground pepper pluto is six times smaller than the earth and now comes the barely imaginable let's first go back to our sun and start the journey from there remember how far that is right more than a half a mile away now to get to the inner boundary of the solar system from this point we'll have to travel around the whole planet four times yep we're still on the scale where the sun is just an eight-inch rock and when it's done we'll find ourselves in a humongous belt of floating chunks of ice the oort cloud the width of this belt is way beyond our planet's limits but we'll try let's take three rocks of the same size as our sun here and lay them in a line and now imagine each of these rocks is the size of the real sun that's the width of the oort cloud for you which goes in a circle around the whole solar system if we put it to our initial scale the sun won't be even visible no bigger than an atom so let's scrap it now and start over shall we okay now this ring of stones contains within it the unfathomable volume of space its radius is roughly one light year or 0.4 inches now and that would be our ground zero for all the following discoveries the closest star system from here is alpha centauri and it will be about 1.5 inches away it consists of three stars and at least one planet that could be inhabitable the system is too small to see on this scale but we'll pretend this grain of sand is adequate and proceed further next we go to the edge of the milky way galaxy our home the galaxy itself is about 100 000 light years across but we're not far from its very center so the journey will only take us 50 000 light years on the super shrunken scale we've created here it will be 1650 feet if you lay down the cn tower in toronto it'll only be a few dozen feet longer from here the nearest galaxy to us is the andromeda in some distant future it'll collide with the milky way but right now to get there we'll need to travel nearly 15 miles that's 2.5 million light years in normal count if you're interested it's also 2.5 depths of the deepest point in the mariana trench known as the challenger deep next up is an object we could finally place on a larger scale ngc 604 a star nebula located in the triangulum galaxy if it were in a single line we'd only need to travel 1.2 miles from where we are now so let's do it and the nebula itself is about 1500 light years in diameter which is equivalent to 50 feet that's like a five-story building but let's get back about half a mile and look at something else this object is almost exactly the size of a boeing 747 and surprisingly it's a galaxy a dwarf galaxy to be precise messier 32 is 6 500 light years across and is a satellite to the andromeda galaxy they move together messier being tugged along by the gravity of its big sister and now i'm going to take you for a ride of your life get ready we're going into distances and sizes that would seem impossible if they weren't true let's first get back to the circle of rocks that is our solar system moving up and away from our star system we can see the milky way galaxy spanning 0.6 miles wide shooting upward still we see the great emptiness around the galaxy that we've already crossed today 15 miles of nothingness then we see the galaxies and dwarf galaxies surrounding ours first the andromeda than others until we're high enough to see the whole local group it's a galactic cluster in which the milky way is no more than one percent the diameter is 62 miles but higher still we rise and now we're looking at a bright and shiny laniakea supercluster which is home to the local group from here our galaxy isn't even visible the diameter of the super cluster is about 3 200 miles it's more than the distance from los angeles to new york and even that's not all higher and higher until we see the boss great wall it's a super cluster located unimaginably far from us and on our current scale its diameter is about 6 200 miles that's longer than the great wall of china with all of its branches no wonder it's the boss and finally we're up in outer space now even though the model of our whole galaxy stayed so far below you can't see it without a telescope and we're now looking at the largest object in the observable universe the hercules corona borealis great wall on the current scale it's as far as 62 100 miles away from earth or a quarter of the distance to the moon and its diameter is the same so it takes up another quarter of the way there are trillions upon trillions of galaxies nebulas and stars and nearly infinite possibilities out there and yet the universe is always expanding so it's also only the beginning

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Keywords: bright side, brightside, bright side facts, interesting facts, space facts, bright side space facts, facts about planets, solar system, size of the solar system, size of the universe, how big is the universe, how big is the solar system, how far away are planets, how far away is the sun, distance from earth to sun, amazing space facts, how far away is the moon, distance from earth to moon, distance from sun to planets, universe to scale, solar system to scale

Id: 1bxUx55I5Z8

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021