Welcome!
NOTICE: If you visit the Orbital Speeds page or the Planet/Sun
Size Comparison page, you may notice that those pages do not sport responsive design (meaning that they do
not size up or down depending on the screen size of the electronic device). This is due to the nature of those pages
maintaining fixed sizing of various page elements. The rest of the site will play nicely with large or small
screen devices.
The scale of the universe certainly leaves us in awe. The earth is but a speck that is invisible in size next to the
giants of the cosmos. Here's a rundown of size-relationship findings and other interesting info:
- The largest known star in diameter is UY Scuti. It is so huge that it would
engulf Jupiter's orbit. Jupiter's orbital diameter is about 968,000,000 miles. With that we can deduce that
the diameter of the UY Scuti star approaches 1 billion miles.
In contrast, our own Sun is just a paltry 865,370 miles in
diameter.
- The star with the most mass that we know of is R136a1. It weighs in at around
300 times the mass of our Sun. It has a diameter of 26,098,000 miles. Surprisingly the UY
Scuti star (mentioned just before for shear diameter) is only 30 times more massive than our sun. The
other stunning finding is that this star has more than 7 million times the brightness of
our Sun.
- Neutron stars are some of the most densely packed celestial bodies out there. The weight of one teaspoon
of neutron star material could weigh in at 10 million tons and up to 1 billion tons. Some sources put the tonnage
at even higher limits.
- Our own Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across (about 587,395,843,200,000,000 miles which
translates to approximately 587.4 quadrillion miles). Staggering numbers indeed!
- Despite our own galaxy seemingly being large, the biggest known galaxy is labeled IC
1101 and is about 5.5 million light-years across. It is said to be 2,000 times more massive than the
Milky Way galaxy.
- Galaxies are structured together into clusters and superclusters. The biggest known supercluster is the
Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. The size is immensely huge at 10 billion
light-years.
- Some estimates say that the total size of the Universe is around 150 billion light-years across. This might confuse
some people considering that the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old. Some might reason that for the
universe to be 150 billion light-years across, it must have been around for at least 75 billion years which is
not the case.
- We don't really know how many stars there are in the universe. Astronomers use the estimated number of stars
in the Milky Way galaxy to get some idea of how many stars there are. Estimates have the Milky Way galaxy set at
up to 400 billion stars. Multiply that with the billions of galaxies out there, and you have an astoundingly large
number of stars (one could say we might have 400,000,000,000 ×
100,000,000,000 galaxies =
40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
stars, some 40 sextillion stars—not a number that most of us use or
even know about).
Visit the rest of the pages for your amusement and amazement.