12. Here’s you from just behind Saturn’s rings:
13. And here’s you from just beyond Neptune, 4 billion miles away.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, everyone and everything you have ever known exists on that little speck.
14. Let’s step back a bit. Here’s the size of Earth compared with the size of our sun. Terrifying, right?
The sun doesn’t even fit in the image.
15. And here’s that same sun from the surface of Mars:
16. But that’s nothing. Again, as Carl once mused, there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth:
science.nationalgeographic.com
17. Which means that there are ones much, much bigger than little wimpy sun. Just look at how tiny and insignificant our sun is:
Our sun probably gets its lunch money stolen.
18. Here’s another look. The biggest star, VY Canis Majoris, is 1,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun:
19. But none of those compares to the size of a galaxy. In fact, if you shrank the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way galaxy down using the same scale, the Milky Way would be the size of the United States:
20. That’s because the Milky Way galaxy is huge. This is where you live inside there:
21. But this is all you ever see:
(That’s not a picture of the Milky Way, but you get the idea.)
22. But even our galaxy is a little runt compared with some others. Here’s the Milky Way compared to IC 1011, 350 million light years away from Earth:
Just THINK about all that could be inside there.
23. But let’s think bigger. In JUST this picture taken by the Hubble telescope, there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, each containing millions of stars, each with their own planets.
