Our Earth is suspended in a very, very large emptiness. The nearest planet is Venus which is 67 million miles away. If we wanted to demonstrate the relative distances between the planets in our solar system, we could stretch a string between two posts and hang a little ball at each point representing a planet’s location. Since all the planets orbit the Sun, we would attach a bigger ball at one end of the string and use that as a reference point. If we assign 3 feet as an arbitrary measure of the distance between the Earth and Sun, Venus would be about 10 inches from the Earth, (measuring toward the Sun.) Mercury would be located about 22 inches from Earth and about 12 inches from the Sun … Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system (about 11 times larger than Earth), would be located more than 12 feet from Earth … and the little dwarf planet Pluto would be about 116 feet from Earth.
If we want to mark the point on our string model to indicate the relative location of the nearest star to our Sun – we will probably need to buy some more string! Alpha Centauri is the nearest and would be located 152 miles from the little ball we used to represent Earth. Imagine how much string we would need to plot the other 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe.
Another interesting way to imagine how vastly the universe is spread-out is to represent the average relative density of the matter it contains. Of course, the matter of the universe is not completely spread out, but is instead lumped together into planets, stars, comets, etc. – But if it was completely spread out evenly, scientists estimate that it would be the equivalent of suspending 1 to 5 hydrogen atoms in a cubic meter of space. To get an idea of how empty that cubic meter would be, compare 1 or 5 atoms to the roughly 500 billion billion billion hydrogen atoms present in a cubic meter of water.
Relatively speaking, our whole world is just a tiny little speck of dust in the vast void of a much, much bigger universe. We may wonder why it is here, but we should never be confused about one thing …
If we want to mark the point on our string model to indicate the relative location of the nearest star to our Sun – we will probably need to buy some more string! Alpha Centauri is the nearest and would be located 152 miles from the little ball we used to represent Earth. Imagine how much string we would need to plot the other 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe.
Another interesting way to imagine how vastly the universe is spread-out is to represent the average relative density of the matter it contains. Of course, the matter of the universe is not completely spread out, but is instead lumped together into planets, stars, comets, etc. – But if it was completely spread out evenly, scientists estimate that it would be the equivalent of suspending 1 to 5 hydrogen atoms in a cubic meter of space. To get an idea of how empty that cubic meter would be, compare 1 or 5 atoms to the roughly 500 billion billion billion hydrogen atoms present in a cubic meter of water.
Relatively speaking, our whole world is just a tiny little speck of dust in the vast void of a much, much bigger universe. We may wonder why it is here, but we should never be confused about one thing …
This is our home.
Video features views of Earth from Space ~with Mellon Collie And the Infinite Sadness as background music. (2:52 min)