Tag Archives: size

You Could Be One Step Closer to Understanding the Size of our Solar System!

Have you ever felt that understanding the truly staggering size of the universe is unfathomable? With the help of this interactive website you can see first-hand the tremendous distances in just our own solar system! Starting from the center of our solar … Continue reading Continue reading

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The Size of the Universe

How to conceptualize the size of the universe?  I think we find it so hard to do it because astronomical numbers dwarf anything we use in day to day life and on some level, our brains can’t process them.  It’s like trying to visualize the national debt.  What’s a couple more zeros here and there […] Continue reading

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Scale, Relativity, and the Power of 10

For my first official blog post, I’d like to write about the Powers of Ten video, and the subsequent site I came across because of it. Although I have seen the Powers of Ten video in a class several years ago, watching it again filled me with the same sense of curiosity and amazement as […] Continue reading

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Just what exactly can we call “big”?

The Universe is almost like a magician in a way. Just when us puny humans seem to grasp an aspect of its nature (or pretend to anyway), it laughs at us and shows us a glimpse of something that leaves us in awe of its vastness. Take a look at this picture above you. Only […] Continue reading

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King of the Galaxies

It’s hard to imagine things on a galactic scale. I have trouble just picturing how big the Earth really is. Now try imagining something larger than Earth, larger than the Solar System, and larger than our entire galaxy. That’s this guy, NGC 6872. It’s a spiral galaxy five times the larger than the Milky Way. It […] Continue reading

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