Thursday, May 28, 2009

How super-duper tiny we all are

Today I received an email from a friend that features comparisons of the planets in our solar system with the various giant stars in the universe and it elicited my quest to find out what the largest star is known to human as of now.

After some googling, the answer is VY Canis Majoris, which has a radius that's around 2000 times the one of the sun, which in turn has a radius that's around 109 times the one of the earth.

How large is that? Watch the following video and you'll see at the end how large the sun is compared to VY Canis Majoris:



Now, can you imagine how small human being is? In that sense, how big is the problem that's puzzling you today? Not that big really :)

P.S. Just to give you another perspective how ridiculously tiny the earth is in this gigantic universe, look at the following two images :P

Image from Wikimedia.org

Image source unknown (let me know
if you know)

2 comments:

  1. Jaw-dropping! Thanks for this wonderful clip!

    ReplyDelete
  2. 渣估: Hehe you're welcome. I always "know" that the earth is small but not until it is put alongside with other stars in real scale do I realize how small it actually is!

    ReplyDelete

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