The Scale of Large.

You may have noticed a different blogger, Chris - he will be posting on here from now on. And in this blog I will be 'spicing' things up a bit, using pictures etc.

From small to large, two opposites yet, they can be very similar. This is because they are relative. They are different when compared to different things.

Now to start off, think of something normal. You or me for example. We are our starting point. Do you class us as big or small? Try and think of it. What do you think? 

Well we are both, a paradox in itself really. We are both huge and microscopic. Compared to a quark, or an electron we are gigantic, but to the Sun? Tiny.

Think of a big building, around about 60 stories. Thats is a about me or you lying in a row about 100 times (taking your about 6ft). Now, lie your building down on its side 10 times, we have quite a long distance now, around about a mile. This bridge (The Golden Gate Bridge) Is around a mile long. Now, lie down your bridge 10 times in a row, we have quite a large city now, something along the lines of San Francisco maybe?

Think about 100 San Francisco's and we have a huge part of America. If you times this amount by 10, we may have something around about the diameter of Earth. 

Earth is something we can relate too, but we cannot comprehend to the extreme vastness of it. Sticking to the scale of multiplying by 10 or 100, if we multiply Earth by around about 10, we have around the diameter of Jupiter (by diameter I mean across the 'equator')! Now at this point we definitely cannot comprehend the size of it, but back to Earth. Multiply Earth by 100! (109 to be exact) We get the diameter of the Sun, a huge object we see everyday, but cannot imagine how uncontrollably large it is. 

Now moving on, into the very very big things. The diameter of the Sun is about 1,391,000 kilometres! Whereas the Earths diameter is 12,756 kilometres! Sticking to the scale again, if you multiply the Sun's diameter by about 100 - we get the distance from the Earth to the Sun! This unimaginably vast! 

From on star to another, to get from our Sun to the nearest star; in the Alpha Centauri system, it is called Proxima Centauri. If you get the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and multiply it by around about 200,000 times. You will arrive at Proxima Centauri, this is around 4 light years.

Imagine how fast light is, now imagine light travelling in a straight line for a year, far right? Now imagine it for 4 years. An unbelievable distance.

From 4 light years to 100,000. Imagine the distance from our Sun to Proxima Centauri, 25,000 times. This is the diameter of the Milky Way. 100,000 light years. It take light 100,000 years to travel this far. This is huge. And to think, most of our Galaxy is free space.

Now to the size of the observable Universe. The size of the the observable Universe is...

28 BILLIONS PARSECS!

You wont know what a parsec is, so ill go back to light years - this is around about 93 billion lightyears! Way to big to comprehend, for all we know our Universe may even be infinite although I believe it is finite. To get this number you would have to multiply the size of the Milky way not by 1000, but by 1000 then 1000 again! 1,000,000 times! (When we round the Universes diameter up to 100 billion light years.)

To conclude, are we big? Are we small? Is anything big in the world we live in? Or to be honest, is anything even small? The scale of everything is not as we think it is, it is much vaster. Think about it.

Thanks for reading, Ben.