26 Pictures Will Make You Re-Evaluate Your
Entire Existence
The universe, man THE UNIVERSE.
1. This is the Earth! This is where you live.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image / Via visibleearth.nasa.gov
2. And this is where you live in your neighborhood, the solar
system.
Via foxnews.com
3. Heres the distance, to scale, between the Earth and the
moon. Doesnt look too far, does it?
4. THINK AGAIN. Inside that distance you can fit every
planet in our solar system, nice and neatly.
PerplexingPotato / Via reddit.com
5. But lets talk about planets. That little green smudge is
North America on Jupiter.
NASA / John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk
6. And heres the size of Earth (well, six Earths) compared
with Saturn:
NASA / John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk
7. And just for good measure, heres what Saturns rings
would look like if they were around Earth:
Ron Miller / Via io9.com
8. This right here is a comet. We just landed a probe on one of
those bad boys. Heres what one looks like compared with Los
Angeles:
Matt Wang / Via mentalfloss.com
9. But thats nothing compared to our sun. Just remember:
Via Twitter: @maiwandafghani
10. Heres you from the moon:
NASA
11. Heres you from Mars:
NASA
12. Heres you from just behind Saturns rings:
NASA
13. And heres you from just beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles
away.
NASA
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have ever known exists on that little speck.
14. Lets step back a bit. Heres the size of Earth compared
with the size of our sun. Terrifying, right?
John Brady / Via astronomycentral.co.uk
The sun doesnt even fit in the image.
15. And heres that same sun from the surface of Mars:
NASA
16. But thats nothing. Again, as Carl once mused, there are
more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every
beach on Earth:
Via science.nationalgeographic.com
17. Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than
little wimpy sun. Just look at how tiny and insignificant our
sun is:
Via en.wikipedia.org
Our sun probably gets its lunch money stolen.
18. Heres another look. The biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, is
1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun:
Via youtube.com
19. But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact,
if you shrank 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 would be the size of the United States:
Via reddit.com
20. Thats because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where
you live inside there:
Via teecraze.com
21. But this is all you ever see:
Via Twitter: @lucybrockle
(Thats not a picture of the Milky Way, but you get the idea.)
22. But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some
others. Heres the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350
million light years away from Earth:
Via Twitter: @smokeinpublic
Just THINK about all that could be inside there.
23. But lets 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.
Via hubblesite.org
24. Heres 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.
Via wikisky.org
Some of the other galaxies are thought to have formed only a few hundred million years AFTER the
Big Bang.
25. And just keep this in mind thats a picture of a very
small, small part of the universe. Its just an insignificant
fraction of the night sky.
Via thetoc.gr
26. And, you know, its pretty safe to assume that there are
some black holes out there. Heres the size of a black hole
compared with Earths orbit, just to terrify you:
D. Benningfield/K. Gebhardt/StarDate / Via mcdonaldobservatory.org
So if youre ever feeling upset about your favorite show being
canceled or the fact that they play Christmas music way too
early just remember
This is your home.
By Andrew Z. Colvin (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (creativecommons.org) or GFDL (gnu.org)], via
Wikimedia Commons
This is what happens when you zoom out from your home to
your solar system.
And this is what happens when you zoom out farther
By Andrew Z. Colvin (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (creativecommons.org) or GFDL (gnu.org)], via
Wikimedia Commons
And farther
Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikipedia Commons
Keep going
Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons
Just a little bit farther
Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons
Almost there
Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons
And here it is. Heres everything in the observable universe,
and heres your place in it. Just a tiny little ant in a giant jar.
Above image by Andrew Z. Colvin / Via Wikimedia Commons
Oh man.
