The universe, like an atom, is empty
Since space technology is making headlines again, I thought it would be a great time to share some fascinating trivia about the universe through some visual aid. These facts serve to remind us how negligible and irrelevant everything is in the grand scheme of things, yet how incredibly relevant each detail still is.
If we try to scale the Solar System down to fit in a living room, the Sun would be the size of a pea, and all the planets would be microscopic. Jupiter would be like a grain of sand. That's how our solar system is compared to empty space, just a Pea.
If Earth were the size of a football, the Moon would be a golf ball situated about 7 meters away. The Sun would be the size of a mini-asteroid (roughly 360Kms in size) located approximately 5.6 kilometres away from Earth.
The distance between Earth and the Moon is sufficient to fit all the planets of the Solar System in between, side by side. Jupiter is also so large that you could fit all the other planets inside it.
You could fit approximately 11,740 Earths in the space between Earth and the Sun. Surprisingly, only about 100 Suns could fit in the same space.
The Sun holds about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. All the planets combined make up just about 0.14% of the Solar System's mass.
If you were to travel to Neptune at the speed of a commercial airplane, it would take you about 5,000 years to get there.
Pluto is actually smaller than Earth's Moon. If Earth's Moon were a basketball, Pluto would be a softball. That's one reason it was reclassified and is no longer considered a planet.
If you could fold a piece of paper 42 times, it would reach the Moon. While 42 doesn't seem like a lot, it's actually 2^42 layers, a number in the 10^12 range.
Everything around you is essentially stardust. A piece of rock or a drop of water was probably once part of a different planet or star. Imagine if these elements were sentient beings; think of all they would have experienced.
Gold and other heavy metals are formed when two stars collide. That's why they are considered rare and valuable; you can't make them in a lab.
Voyager 1, the first human-made object to exit the Solar System, is moving at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour. Despite this incredible speed, it took over 35 years to leave the Solar System.
If the Milky Way galaxy were the size of the United States, our Solar System would be the size of a quarter.
The Andromeda galaxy, our closest galactic neighbour, is so far away that even if you traveled at the speed of light, it would take you 2.5 million years to get there.
The energy produced by the Sun in one second is more than humanity has used throughout all of recorded history.
The mass of the Milky Way galaxy is so great that it's about 1.5 trillion times the mass of our Sun.
If you lined up all the DNA in your body end to end, it would stretch from Earth to the Sun and back over 600 times. In contrast, even if you consider the entire Solar System, your DNA would still be long enough to stretch across it multiple times!
The most distant object ever observed by humans is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang. It's located about 46 billion light-years away.
The largest known star, UY Scuti, is so big that if it were placed at the center of our Solar System, it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and even Jupiter.
If Earth were to become a black hole, it would need to be compressed into a radius of about 9 millimeters, roughly the size of a grape, while retaining its current mass of approximately 5.97 x 10^24 kilograms.
The smallest particles in the universe, known as quarks, are so tiny that they can't be seen or measured directly. Yet, they make up the protons and neutrons within atoms, which are the building blocks of everything.
Bonus Fact About Gravity: The apple doesn't fall on the Earth; the Earth falls on the apple. When you fall, you're essentially being hit by the Earth moving at 9.8 meters per second squared. That's why it hurts so much.
Bonus Mathematical Fact: If you wrap a rope around either a tennis ball, the planet Earth, or even the entire galaxy, and make that rope just 1 meter longer than their respective circumferences, the rope would always hover 0.16 meters above the surface.
"The next time you look up at the sky, remember: it's not as crowded as it seems."