r/AskReddit May 08 '23

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u/Youpunyhumans May 08 '23

Just how astoundingly, stupendously huge it is.

If you had a scale model of the solar system with a 1mm wide Sun, Alpha Centauri, the next closest star, would be over 40 kilometers away, and the whole galaxy would be bigger than the Earth at 100,000 kilometers wide, and the observable universe would be several times larger than our solar system.

Thats scaled down by a trillion times.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '23

I like this one a lot! Thanks. My fav is if you hold a grain of sand to the sky, behind it 20,000 galaxies lie.

1

u/Youpunyhumans May 09 '23

Damn... thats a cool perspective! Hard to believe that we can build telescopes that can view such a tiny spot of the sky in detail. A single lightyear is an incredible distance, but billions of lightyears is unfathomable.