Explore Cosmic Scale: 8 Visual Comparisons to Unravel Universe's Vastness. Prepare for a cosmic perspective shift!
Bangalore: Ever felt like your problems are just too big? Well, try wrapping your head
around the actual big picture – the universe. It's so mind-bogglingly vast that numbers just don’t cut it.
That's why we've compiled eight visual comparisons that will hopefully give you a better understanding of the sheer scale of the cosmos and your place in it. Forget your Monday blues; prepare for a cosmic perspective shift!
Earth as a Marble, Sun as a Beach Ball
Imagine shrinking Earth to the size of a marble. Suddenly, the Sun becomes a giant beach ball, about 10 meters across. Now, imagine this beach ball is in Delhi. Where would the marble Earth be? Answer: somewhere in Kolkata!
That’s how much empty space there is in our solar system, and our solar system is just a tiny speck of dust within the Milky Way. This simple comparison highlights the immense distances between even our closest celestial neighbours.
It’s quite humbling to think that all life as we know it exists on that tiny marble, orbiting its gigantic, fiery neighbour at an almost unbelievable distance. Thinking of the vast distances, light years are what we use for measuring distance in space. It equates to 9.
461 × 10 to the power of 12 kilometers.
Our Solar System's Orbit Around Milky Way
Our solar system is not stationary. It’s orbiting the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Imagine the Milky Way as being the size of India. Our solar system will be a dust particle. This dust particle will complete only one orbit around India at 230 million years.
You get an insight of how big the milky way is. And also the period of time it takes to orbit around it once. We are also moving at a very high speed in space. But as the space is vastly wide, we dont even meet other neighboring stars.
The Milky Way compared to a city; Universe as everything
The Milky Way as a City, the Universe as... Everything! Think of the Milky Way, our galaxy, as a bustling city like Mumbai. It contains hundreds of billions of stars, planets, gas clouds, and dust.
Now, imagine the observable universe as literally everything you can possibly imagine – all the cities, countries, continents, oceans, and the space between them, expanded beyond measure.
Each of those 'cities' is a whole, massive galaxy like our own, containing billions of stars and potentially countless planets. The universe has around 2 trillion galaxies. Understanding this scale is that you are able to feel how small and minuscule we are.
The Observable Universe vs. The Actual Universe
Here’s where things get really mind-bending. The observable universe is like looking through a telescope with limited range. We can only see as far as light has had time to travel to us since the Big Bang.
But scientists speculate that the actual universe is much, much larger, possibly even infinite. Imagine the observable universe as a single grain of rice. The entire rice field represents the entirety of the universe. And some theories say it is infinite.
If the universe is infinite then there will be possibilities of other planets with human beings.
The Speed of Light Around Earth
We say, light is the fastest in speed, that is, 300,000 Kilometers per second. Even with that speed, it takes 1.3 seconds to reflect moon light towards earth, that is the fastest light, just travelling at that speed.
Now imagine if the light has to travel across the milky way which is 100,000 light years across. This means it will take 100,000 years for the light to travel to other end of the planet from our location.
If we are on a far-off location and any event happened at a distant location, it is visible to us, thousands of years later.
The Cosmic Microwave Background
Have you ever seen 'snow' or static on an old television screen? A tiny percentage of that snow, about 1%, is actually the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the afterglow of the Big Bang. That means, we could also be seeing the same thing on our television.
It is a constant reminder that we are surrounded by the remnants of the universe's birth. The CMB is the oldest light in the universe, a relic from when the universe was only 380,000 years old. Studying it helps us understand the early universe, its composition, and how galaxies formed.
That means we could also see the same on our television.
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