Putting it in perspective - Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Factoid alert]

If you’ve got a bit going on in life, it sometimes helps to put things in perspective.

Consider this:

The nearest star to ours is the appropriately named Proxima Centauri. It is 4.22 light years away. Nice and close.

But light travels at about 300,000 km/second (or 3 x 10 to the 8th m/s). So each light year is about 9.5 million million kms. OK – not so close…

Or about 267 times the distance from us to our sun (an “Astronomical Unit”). Still pretty hard to picture…

So picture our sun and Proxima Centauri as little glass marbles. The relative distance between them would then be about 300kms – from Canberra to Sydney. Still hard to conceive?

The fastest spaceship we’ve launched is currently headed towards Pluto at an amazing 23 km/second. But relative to the marbles, this would be about the speed that grass grows, and it would take that ship some 60,000 years to get there. Right – really not too close at all.

But…

Proxima Centauri is just the closest star. Our galaxy the Milky Way has somewhere between 200 and 400 billion other stars (yes that’s billion), and stretches across 100,000 light years.

But…

The Milky Way is just one galaxy. Astronomers have estimated another 100 billion galaxies, each with between 10 million and one trillion stars, and stretching over 46.5 billion light years.

Click on the picture to zoom in, and see how many galaxies can you see in that one small bit of space.

And for the Monty Python take, click here.

(Sources: Fred Clark’s “Why is Uranus Upside Down?” and Wikipedia.)