The incomprehensible scale of Space 🧵 1. Perspective is everything. Feel small yet?

The incomprehensible scale of Space 🧵 1. Perspective is everything. Feel small yet?

2. Earth from Mars This photo from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows the Earth as seen from the surface of Mars, shining brighter than any star in the Martian night sky.

3. A visual representation of the size of Jupiter compared to Earth. With a radius of 43,440.7 miles (69,911 kilometers), Jupiter is 11 times wider than Earth.

4. This is what our solar system moving through space looks like. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, carrying all the planets, asteroids and comets of our solar system, which moves at an average speed of 450,000 miles per hour (720,000 km/h). x.com/ScienceGuys_/s…

5. One of the largest black holes ever discovered and our solar system. TON 618 has a mass about 66 billion times that of the Sun.

6. This is an artistic rendition of how big Saturn would approximately look if it were at the same distance as the Moon.

7. The amazing scale of the Pillars of Creation The Pillars of Creation is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, located 6,500–7,000 light-years from Earth.

8. To add fuel to the fire... here’s the famous Pillars image overlaid on a wider view of the full nebula. The second one shows the complete nebula, with the Pillars positioned just below the center.

9. What the Andromeda galaxy would look like from earth if it was a bit brighter

10. Incredible footage of Saturn rising from behind the Moon Saturn's closest distance to Earth is about 1.2 billion km (746 million miles).

11. Saturn's hexagon compared to the US For those who want to have an idea of how large Saturn’s “hexagon” storm is...

12. Professor Brian Cox explaining the size of the Universe

13. Mystic Mountain captured by Hubble in the Carina Nebula This nebula, one of the largest diffuse nebulae in our skies, is located approximately 8,500 light-years from Earth.

14. The Earth compared to the Sun, and the Sun compared to other stars

15. Stephenson 2-18 VS Ton 618

16. This vertically oriented logarithmic map of the Universe spans nearly 20 orders of magnitude, taking us from planet Earth to the edge of the visible Universe. Each large “mark” on the right side’s scale bar corresponds to an increase in distance scales by a factor of 10.

17. Temperatures across our Solar System The temperature of a planet is strongly influenced by its distance from the Sun. Earth, located about 150 million km from the Sun, has a habitable climate, while distant planets like Neptune, over 4.5 billion km away, are much colder.

18. A logarithmic chart of distances, showing Voyager, our Solar System, the Oort Cloud, and our nearest star: Proxima Centauri.

19. The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of the four largest planets in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Neptune, the fourth largest planet, is about four times wider than Earth with an equatorial diameter of about 30,775 miles.

20. How far away are Galaxies?

21. Solar System bodies to scale x.com/physicsJ/statu…

22. Here’s how Saturn’s rings would look like if they were placed around Earth

23. A Neutron Star in comparison to the size of New York City

24. Looking up at the night sky, you can see thousands of stars and they’re just a fraction of the numerous stars in the universe

25. Olympus Mons, Latin for "Mount Olympus," is a massive shield volcano on Mars. At about 2.5 times the elevation of Mount Everest, it is the tallest known mountain in the Solar System.

26. Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away, as it was leaving our solar system. As Carl Sagan put it: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Thanks for reading till the end! If you enjoyed this thread on the scale and beauty of the universe, please follow me for more content (@JamesLucasIT) and retweet the first post:

James Lucas@JamesLucasIT · Nov 24, 2024

The incomprehensible scale of Space 🧵 1. Perspective is everything. Feel small yet?

One more: UY Scuti is the largest star in the Universe observed so far. The red supergiant is 1,708 times wider than our Sun, with a radius of 1.2 billion km (738 million miles).

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