The scale of the universe

I rather like the observable universe. More than an observable mouthful is a waste.

Yes, I have small breasts.

 

Just remember .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY

 

Physical proximity to other stars doesn't make much difference, it's all about relative position and apparent brightness. The seven stars of Canis Major, for example, range in distance from the Earth from 336+/-20 light years away to roughly 3000.

 

So, our star might not even show up vs the brighter stars out there, eh? That makes me a sad stargazer.

Thanks for the new perspective, though, MSD.

 

It's ironic that the same people maintaining "no child left behind" have to explain to children why Pluto didn't get a social promotion.

universe > Pluto

 

...at least the universe has never threatened to damn me, beyond death. Tidy concepts are useful on limited scales.

 

So how much larger has the Universe gotten since this thread was first posted?

 

c x 22 days + what we can't see, yet? Larger enough to humble, I think.

 

I travelled to Sherbrook, Quebec on the weekend, passing through Houlton, Maine (the northern terminus of I-95). I stopped at a tourist information centre there and observed a small, 25 centish sized ball with a smaller ball about 6 inches away from it. It was a scale model of Pluto and Charon, part of the largest scale model in the world, a 1:93,000,000 model of the solar system. The sun is a 2-story arc of metal at the University of Presque Isle, 40 MILES AWAY!! All the planets are shown at the appropriate distance from the sun (the earth, of course, is a mile away since we're 93,000,000 miles from the sun), and to the appropriate scale.

I thought this was a very neat way of showing just how frighteningly huge the universe is, given this 40 miles represents only a few light-hours of distance in a space that is almost 40-billion light years across. Someday I may go back and just check out the other models.

 

^ that is very cool

 

Nova on PBS has great program now "The Fabric of the Cosmos"

If you get a chance, watch it

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html

 

This is the coolest thing I've seen online in a while.

 

i came across the scale-of-the-universe animation a few weeks ago and i was quite intrigued by it. actuallym, i do like the music in it as it suits the subject imo. a point of interest for me was the huge void between neutrinos and the planck length. actually, all the way up to atomic particles is very scant and this is a pretty powerful demonstration of just how little we know at the atomic level or lower. it´s a bit odd that we can grasp large sizes (as much as scale is impossible to comprehend as we have no visible comparison for the stupendously large scale of the observable universe we still understand what is out there but going the other way we really seem to have no idea what´s going on at the very small level. to top it off it seems that the technology to magnify small items appears to have all but stagnated as we still can´t "see" an atom. just my 2isk

 

I like this one, too: Powers of Ten:

 

Scale of the Universe 2 by Cary and Michael Huang, California High School Students - ABC News