Knowledge

If the Earth were a grain of sand, then how big would the rest of the universe be in comparison?

Let’s make earth be a largish grain of sand, about 1.27 mm in diameter. This gives us a scale of 10^10 or ten billion to one. Fairly easy to make calculations this way.

All in this scale:

  1. Distance to the moon: 40 mm, about 1.6 inches
  2. Distance to the sun (1 AU): 15 meters or about 50 feet.
  3. Distance to Jupiter: 78 m.
  4. Distance to Pluto: 600 m.
  5. One light year (9.5 trillion km): 950 km. BTW, this means light moves at 0.03 m/s.
  6. Distance to nearest star (4.22 LY): 4000 km.
  7. Distance to galactic center (26,000 LY): 25 million km.
  8. Distance to Andromeda galaxy (2.54 million LY): 2.4 billion km (but at this scale, still within our real-world solar system).
  9. Distance to the center of our Virgo supercluster (about 65 million LY): 60 billion km (deep in the Oort Cloud, in the real universe). There are probably 10 million superclusters in the observable universe, so we are still a big step away from the size!
  10. Distance to the edge of the observable universe (94 billion LY): 90 trillion km, almost 10 LY in the real universe.

So scaling the earth to a grain of sand, Pluto is a 10 minute walk, local stars are a plane flight away, our local group of galaxies fits in the solar system, but the edge of the universe is way past the nearest star! A freaking big place!

Edit — just for fun: Bryan Harris asked about sizes (rather than distances) in this scale:

11. Size of Jupiter: 14.3 mm (a large marble).

12. Size of HAT-P-35b (largest accurately measured exoplanet): 50–70 mm (a tennis ball).

14. Size of the sun: 139 mm (a grapefruit).

15. Size of Betelgeuse (well-known hypergiant star): 125 +/- 25 meters (a large blimp). A few hyper giants are half again as big, and in this scale, would fill a large stadium!

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