26 Pictures That Show the True Scale of Earth, Space and the Universe

This right here is a comet. we just landed a probe on one of those bad boys. here’s what one looks like compared with los angeles

Space is so large that ordinary numbers stop meaning anything. Saying the Sun is 150 million kilometres away, or that a galaxy lies a billion light-years off, rarely produces a real sense of size. Pictures do a better job. This gallery collects 26 widely shared images, plus a closing zoom-out sequence, that compare Earth with the Moon, the planets, the Sun, giant stars, galaxies and the observable universe.

Each picture comes with a short explanation of what it actually shows, who made it, and where the popular captions got the numbers wrong. A few classics needed correcting: the galaxy often labelled “IC 1011” is IC 1101 and lies roughly a billion light-years away, VY Canis Majoris is no longer considered certainly the largest star, and the giant black hole in NGC 1277 turned out to be smaller than first claimed. The sense of awe survives the corrections. If anything, the real figures are stranger.

The original list was compiled by Dave Stopera for BuzzFeed. Image credits are given with each picture where the creator is known.

Earth, the Moon and the distance between them

1. Our planet

This is the earth! this is where you live.

This view of Earth comes from NASA’s Visible Earth collection, produced at the Goddard Space Flight Center from satellite data. Earth is about 12,742 km wide, and almost everything any human has ever done happened on this one sphere. It is the reference point for every comparison that follows.

2. The Solar System at a glance

And this is where you live in your neighborhood, the solar system.

Diagrams like this one, shared by Fox News, line up the Sun and eight planets so they fit on one screen. They are useful but badly misleading on distance: if the planets were spaced to scale, they would be invisible specks separated by vast empty gaps. Neptune is about 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth is.

3. Earth and the Moon, to scale

Here’s the distance, to scale, between the earth and the moon. doesn’t look too far, does it?

Drawn at true scale, the Moon sits about 30 Earth-widths away, an average of roughly 384,400 km. Light covers that gap in about 1.3 seconds. The twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon are the only people who have crossed it.

4. Every planet fits in the gap

Think again. inside that distance you can fit every planet in our solar system, nice and neatly.

Created by the Reddit user PerplexingPotato, this graphic places Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune side by side between Earth and the Moon. Their diameters add up to around 380,000 km, so they do fit at the Moon’s average distance, with only a few thousand kilometres to spare. At the Moon’s closest approach, about 363,000 km, they would not.

Giant planets, imaginary rings and a real comet

5. North America on Jupiter

But let’s talk about planets. that little green smudge is north america on jupiter.

Jupiter is about 11 times wider than Earth and could hold more than 1,300 Earths by volume. In this comparison by John Brady of Astronomy Central, using NASA imagery, a whole continent becomes a small smudge. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm observed for centuries, is itself wider than Earth, although it has been shrinking.

6. Saturn beside Earth

And here’s the size of earth (well, six earths) compared with saturn

Another John Brady comparison, again built from NASA images, sets Earth-sized discs against Saturn. Saturn’s equator spans about 116,000 km, around nine Earth diameters, and its volume could hold roughly 760 Earths. Yet it is so light for its size that its average density is lower than water.

7. If Earth had rings like Saturn

And just for good measure, here’s what saturn’s rings would look like if they were around earth

This is a painting by space artist Ron Miller, published by io9, imagining a Saturn-style ring system around Earth. Such rings would appear as a bright arch across the sky, looking different depending on your latitude. It is a thought experiment, not a prediction: Earth has no rings, although some scientists think it may have had brief ones in the distant past.

8. A comet next to Los Angeles

Matt Wang’s graphic, shared by Mental Floss, overlays comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on Los Angeles. The comet is only about 4 km across, yet in November 2014 it became the first comet with a spacecraft landed on its surface, when the European Space Agency’s Philae lander touched down from the Rosetta probe. The comet was discovered in 1969 by Soviet astronomers Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko.

The Sun and the giant stars

9. “You are here”

But that’s nothing compared to our sun. just remember

This popular image, shared on Twitter by @maiwandafghani, sets the rocky planets as tiny dots beside the gas giants and the Sun. The Sun is about 109 times wider than Earth, and roughly 1.3 million Earths would fit inside it. It contains about 99.8% of all the mass in the Solar System.

10. Earth beside the Sun

Let’s step back a bit. here’s the size of earth compared with the size of our sun. terrifying, right?

In this comparison by John Brady, the Sun is so big that only part of its edge fits in the frame. Its diameter is about 1.39 million km. Even so, astronomers class it as an ordinary, medium-sized yellow dwarf star.

11. The Sun seen from Mars

And here’s that same sun from the surface of mars

NASA’s Mars rovers have photographed many sunsets on the red planet. Because Mars is about one and a half times farther from the Sun than Earth, the Sun looks only about two-thirds as wide in the Martian sky. Fine dust in the thin atmosphere gives Martian sunsets a bluish glow around the Sun, the reverse of the reds and oranges we see at home.

12. More stars than grains of sand

But that’s nothing. again, as carl once mused, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on earth

Carl Sagan popularised the comparison between stars in the universe and grains of sand on Earth’s beaches in his 1980 television series Cosmos. Estimates are very rough, but astronomers put the number of stars in the observable universe somewhere around a billion trillion or more, while estimates for beach sand are usually lower. The comparison is meant to give a sense of scale, not an exact count.

13. Stars that dwarf the Sun

Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than little wimpy sun. just look at how tiny and insignificant our sun is

This comparison chart was drawn by the Wikipedia illustrator Mysid. It steps up from the Sun through brighter stars to red supergiants, at which point the Sun shrinks to a single pixel. Stars come in an enormous range of sizes, from small red dwarfs to supergiants hundreds or thousands of times wider than the Sun.

14. VY Canis Majoris

Here’s another look. the biggest star, vy canis majoris, is 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun

This animation, taken from a YouTube star-size comparison, ends with VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major about 3,800 light-years away. Its radius is currently estimated at around 1,420 times the Sun’s, which gives it a volume almost 3 billion times larger. Placed at the centre of our Solar System, its surface would reach beyond Jupiter. It is often called the largest known star, but measurements of such stars are uncertain, and a few others may rival it.

Earth seen from far away

15. Earth from the Moon

NASA has photographed Earth from the Moon and lunar orbit many times, from the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s to modern robotic orbiters. From there, Earth appears about four times wider than the Moon looks to us. Pictures like these changed how many people thought about the planet as a single, fragile home.

16. Earth from Mars

From the surface of Mars, Earth is just a bright point in the evening or morning sky, much as Venus appears to us. NASA rovers have captured this view, including Curiosity in 2014. Every person alive at the moment the shutter opened was somewhere inside that dot.

17. Earth from beyond Saturn’s rings

Here’s you from just behind saturn’s rings

On 19 July 2013, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took this picture from behind Saturn, about 1.44 billion km from home, while the planet blocked the Sun. Organised by imaging scientist Carolyn Porco as “The Day the Earth Smiled”, it invited people around the world to look up and wave. Earth and the Moon appear as a faint pale dot below the rings.

18. The Pale Blue Dot

And here’s you from just beyond neptune, 4 billion miles away

On 14 February 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back from about 6 billion km away (roughly 3.7 billion miles) and took this famous image at Carl Sagan’s urging. Earth fills about one-tenth of a single pixel, caught in a band of scattered sunlight. In his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote of that speck: That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

The Milky Way and the galaxies beyond

19. The Sun as a blood cell, the galaxy as a country

But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. in fact, if you shrunk the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the milky way galaxy down using the same scale, the milky way wo

This comparison started as a Reddit “Today I learned” post: shrink the Sun to the size of a white blood cell and the Milky Way, on the same scale, becomes roughly the size of the United States. Checking the arithmetic with a 12-micrometre cell and a galaxy about 100,000 light-years wide gives a span of around 8,000 km, nearer twice the width of the contiguous US. The order of magnitude holds, and so does the point.

20. Pinning your location

That’s because the milky way galaxy is huge. this is where you live inside there

This design, sold as a T-shirt by Teecraze, drops a map pin on a spiral galaxy. The galaxy pictured looks like our neighbour Andromeda, because no one has ever photographed the Milky Way from outside. Our Sun actually sits about 26,000 light-years from the centre of the Milky Way, in a minor spiral arm called the Orion Arm.

21. The part of the galaxy we see

Shared on Twitter by @lucybrockle, this illustration of the Milky Way marks a small yellow circle around the Sun. Nearly all the individual stars visible to the naked eye lie within a few thousand light-years of us, a tiny fraction of a galaxy holding perhaps 100 to 400 billion stars. The pale band we call the Milky Way is the combined glow of countless more distant stars we cannot see one by one.

22. The Milky Way next to IC 1101

But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. here’s the milky way compared to ic 1011, 350 million light years away from earth

This comparison, shared on Twitter by @smokeinpublic, is usually captioned with the wrong name and distance. The giant elliptical galaxy is IC 1101, in the constellation Virgo, and current estimates put it about 1 billion light-years away rather than 350 million. Size estimates vary widely with how faint its outer glow is measured, from roughly 400,000 light-years to well over a million, compared with about 100,000 for the Milky Way.

Looking back in time: deep fields and black holes

23. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field

But let’s think bigger. in just this picture taken by the hubble telescope, there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, each containing millions of stars, each with their own planets

Released by NASA on 9 March 2004, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field combines about 11 days of exposure on one tiny patch of sky in the constellation Fornax. It shows around 10,000 galaxies, each containing anywhere from millions to hundreds of billions of stars. Most of those stars likely have planets of their own.

24. UDF 423

Here’s one of the galaxies pictured, udf 423. this galaxy is 10 billion light years away. when you look at this picture, you are looking billions of years into the past

This close-up, viewed through the WikiSky atlas, shows UDF 423, one of the larger spiral galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. It is reported to be about 10 billion light-years away, which means the light reaching us left it long before Earth existed. The faintest galaxies in the same field are seen as they were only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

25. A tiny fraction of the sky

$And just keep this in mind — that’s a picture of a very small, small part of the universe. it’s just an insignificant fraction of the night sky$

This graphic, shared by the Greek news site Thetoc, shows where the deep field sits in the night sky. The patch covers about one twenty-six-millionth of the whole sky, smaller than a 1 mm square of paper held a metre from your eye. Point Hubble at almost any dark patch of that size and you would find a similar crowd of galaxies.

26. A black hole versus Earth’s orbit

And, you know, it’s pretty safe to assume that there are some black holes out there. here’s the size of a black hole compared with earth’s orbit, just to terrify you

This illustration by D. Benningfield, K. Gebhardt and StarDate at the University of Texas McDonald Observatory compares the black hole in galaxy NGC 1277, about 240 million light-years away in Perseus, with the orbits of the planets. When it was announced in 2012, its mass was put at around 17 billion Suns. Later studies revised that to roughly 5 billion, still enough to make its event horizon far larger than Earth’s orbit.

Zooming out: Earth’s address in the universe

The last eight images come from a series made by Andrew Z. Colvin and published on Wikimedia Commons under the CC BY-SA 3.0 and GFDL licences. Each panel steps out by a huge factor from the one before, giving Earth a full cosmic address.

Home

So if you’re ever feeling upset about your favorite show being canceled or the fact that they play christmas music way too early — just remember…

The sequence starts close to home, with Earth itself. Everyday frustrations, from cancelled TV shows to early Christmas music, all play out at this scale.

The Solar System

This is what happens when you zoom out from your home to your solar system.

Stepping out, Earth becomes one point among the orbits of eight planets. The Sun’s gravity holds sway far beyond Neptune, out to the distant Oort Cloud of icy bodies.

The Sun’s stellar neighbourhood

And this is what happens when you zoom out farther…

Farther out, the Sun is one star among its nearest neighbours. The closest, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.2 light-years away, a distance our fastest spacecraft would need many thousands of years to cross.

The Milky Way

Next comes our whole galaxy, a barred spiral roughly 100,000 light-years across. The Sun’s neighbourhood from the previous panel is lost in a single spiral arm.

The Local Group

The Milky Way belongs to a small cluster of galaxies called the Local Group, dominated by itself and Andromeda. Andromeda, about 2.5 million light-years away, is the most distant object most people can see with the naked eye.

The Virgo Supercluster and beyond

Zooming out again, the Local Group becomes a minor member of a vast gathering of galaxy groups and clusters centred on the Virgo Cluster. At this scale, galaxies are arranged in sheets and filaments with huge empty voids between them.

Neighbouring superclusters

One step short of the end, the Virgo Supercluster appears as one patch among many neighbouring superclusters. Astronomers have since mapped these structures in more detail, placing our region within a larger flow of galaxies named Laniakea.

The observable universe

The final panel shows the observable universe, a sphere about 93 billion light-years across, filled with a web of superclusters. Everything in the previous images is a point too small to draw. It is the limit of what light has had time to bring us since the Big Bang, not necessarily the edge of everything.

Why scale is so hard to grasp

Human intuition evolved for distances we could walk and numbers we could count. Beyond a few thousand, our brains tend to file everything under “very big”, which is why the gap between a million and a billion feels smaller than it is. Scale pictures help by giving us something familiar to anchor to: a continent on Jupiter, a city beside a comet, a pixel for a planet.

The images above also show how quickly science moves. Several popular captions were based on measurements that later changed, which is a good reminder to check the numbers behind any viral graphic. The broad picture, though, is not in doubt. Earth is small, the universe is unimaginably large, and the fact that we can measure any of it is remarkable in its own right.

Sources: Dave Stopera, BuzzFeed (original list); Wikipedia: Pale Blue Dot; Wikipedia: The Day the Earth Smiled; Wikipedia: 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko; Wikipedia: VY Canis Majoris; Wikipedia: IC 1101; Wikipedia: Hubble Ultra-Deep Field; Wikipedia: NGC 1277; McDonald Observatory: NGC 1277 black hole graphic; NASA Visible Earth.

Related:

COMMENTS

BLOGGER: 2

UnknownDecember 15, 2014 at 11:54 PM
I want just to know: WHY? :)
UnknownJanuary 18, 2019 at 4:08 PM
you wanted them back after they broke your hearts its your choice really getting a magician to spell the cast but when my wife left me and broke my heart I feel that I don't want her back after such a painful time I had to go through. I better be of looking for someone new.