Space, Visualised - The Size, Scale And Make-Up Of The Universe In Pictures

This Is How Many Earths Fit In The Sun (And Other Amazing Space Visualisations)

Space is ridiculous.

Yes, it's big. That much is clear. But just how ridiculously huge isn't always obvious. This is size on the sort of scale where traveling at 186,000 miles per second isn't that fast, even though it's as fast as it is physically possible for anything to travel.

This is size on a scale where even something as small as a human contains 37 trillion cells, but where each of the 100 billion suns in our galaxy looks minuscule compared to the space between each galactic cluster.

We could write this kind of meaningless comparative stuff all day.

But instead, let's just examine some of the best visualations of space and its scale we could find on the web:

Take a trip from the smallest to the biggest thing in the universe:

Let's try that again:

This is how heavy black holes really are:

Here’s some more detail on how that looks for our solar system:

Or, to put it another way, here are the planets compared:

by SpaceFacts.

And the largest star ever discovered compared to our own sun:

Which is this big compared to the Earth (1.3 million times):

This is how much money there is on our little planet:

by xkcd.

Which is handy if you want to explore the universe. Here are all the times we've done that:

And this is the short amount of time we’ve been around to try:

If you only wanted to explore our planet in a little more detail this is how deep you could go:

So let's finish up with something easy.... like the timeline of the universe:

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