can you see this small dot in this image?
on 14th Feb. 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe captured this photo from 6 billion kilometers away.
this image looks like a dust particle on a Canvas
this Dust particle is nothing but our very own Planet Earth where around 8 billion Humans live along with other Animals/plants species.
Just Imagine this is how small we are.
our Milky Way is spread into 100,000 Light Years, (1 light year= 9.4 trillion km), now our Milky Way is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster. It is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars.
so you can just imagine how small we have compared to this scale and that too this Supercluster is still a small part of the universe.
our OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE is estimated to be spread over around 93 billion light years. and it’s around 13.8 billion years old.
The speed at which our universe is Expanding is much greater than the speed of light and it is highly plausible that the inflation of our universe is uneven, which means there are chances that the universe might be expanding at an uneven speed in different directions at different speeds.
Scientists measure the size of the universe in a myriad of different ways. They can measure the waves from the early universe, known as baryonic acoustic oscillations, that fill the cosmic microwave background. They can also use standard candles, such as type 1A supernovae, to measure distances. However, these different methods of measuring distances can provide answers.
How inflation is changing is also a mystery. While the estimate of 92 billion light-years comes from the idea of a constant rate of inflation, many scientists think that the rate is slowing down. If the universe expanded at the speed of light during inflation, it should be 10^23, or 100 sextillions. One explanation for this, outlined by NASA in 2019, is that dark energy events may have impacted the expansion of the universe in the moments after the Big Bang.
The size of the universe depends on its shape. Some Scientists have predicted the possibility that the universe might be closed like a sphere, infinite and negatively curved like a saddle, or flat and infinite.
A finite universe has a finite size that can be measured; this would be the case in a closed spherical universe. But an infinite universe has no size by definition.
Answer:
Our observable universe is estimated to be spread in 92 billion light-years, that’s really huge if we compare it with the size of our Earth/Sun.
Remember! This Size of the universe is just for the Observable Universe only, we never know how big the actual universe could be, there might be some other bubble universes or Multiverse too, or they are in higher Dimensions that we can’t see with current Science and Technology. whatever the size of the universe could be, one thing we can say is that it’s truly Brobdingnagian and beyond our current limits.
People think they are way more important than they are.
Earth could blow up tomorrow and the universe wouldn’t even notice.
We are so tiny and inconsequential in the universe, it’s not even funny.
For example, look at these pictures.
Now look at Earth:
Now look at Earth compared to Jupiter and Saturn… pretty wild
but then you compare it to the sun and Earth is a speck of dust
And you're thinking “the sun is pretty impressive though” -- actually it’s not. Compare it to these other stars in the Milky Way galaxy….
Just for good measure let’s see how big Arcturus in the picture above (that dwarfs our sun) looks compared to some bigger stars in the Milky Way
Antares must be a gigantic impressive whopper of a star then right? Let’s look at it in the Milky Way… I bet it stands out!
Oh well. I guess it doesn’t.
Is the Milky Way an impressive galaxy?
Not really. There are billions more. Some are thousands of times larger.
Humans like to think that we are important, but in the grand scale of things… we just aren’t.
And believe it or not, all the above is still only a teeny tiny aspect of “space”.
The observable universe is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter. The universe itself may or may not be infinite and its overall shape or topology is unknown.
The observable universe is a ball centred on ourselves. Even though the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old, we can see out to almost 47 billion light-years because those points have expanded away from us since the radiation left them.
A light-year, by the way, is a unit of distance: the distance travelled by light in a year. Light travels almost 300,000 kilometres per second. Light takes
- Less than a seventh of a second to go round the Earth
- Just over a second to get to the Moon
- Just over eight minutes to get from the Sun to Earth
- About four hours to reach Neptune
- Over four years to reach the nearest Star
- Thirty thousand years to reach the centre of the Milky Way
- Over two million years to reach the Andromeda Galaxy
Forty-seven billion light-years is a very long way...
