BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Scale of the Universe 2 - website review

How big is the Universe? And how small? This website takes you from yoctometers - unbelievably small - to yottometers – just as unbelievably big. Navigate up or down from the human scale, with drawings and diagrams that make sense of the numbers. A great tour for everyone.

Scale of the Universe 2 - website

Here is the starting point for Cary Huang's exploration of the Universe: the human scale, 1 meter.

The website is here.

I've found this infographic about scale in the Universe, which is quite good. I do notice that the distances aren't all exactly the same as the "Scale of the Universe 2". But the sizes and distances in the Universe are far from exact, and the numbers are based on a number of assumptions which aren't universally accepted.

I noticed the infographic didn't include some of my favorites from the website I reviewed, including the neutron star compared to earthly locations. I thought that was really startling and interesting.

The Sun is really BIG! It's impossible to make reasonably-sized diagrams of the Solar System that can show this, so we tend to think of the Sun as smaller than it is. (It doesn't help that, from Earth, the Sun and the Moon look the same size.) This image compares the size of the Sun to that of the planets.

And this image shows some stars that are bigger than the Sun.

Makes me feel rather small. How about you?

Here is an infographic showing some scale in the Universe using astronomical photos. It doesn't take you to the edge of the observable Universe, but it does show quite a lot of comparisons of heavenly bodies and some interesting shots of the Hubble Deep Field.