(To-scale models using a golf ball for the Sun) If the Sun was the size of a golf ball, the Earth would be a grain of salt 13 feet away. Jupiter would be about the size of a "bb" around 65 feet away. The nearest star (Proxima Centauri) would be the size of a pea 664 miles away (that's about the distance from Austin, Texas to the nearest border of Florida). If you're reading this, I'm guessing you know what Orien's belt is.. The left star of Orien's belt is Alnitak. If the Sun was a golf ball, Alnitak would be a sphere with a one yard diameter and there's nowhere on Earth you could drive to make this model work. Alnitak would be about 200,000 miles away and the circumference of the Earth is about 26,000 miles. That 200,000 miles..is just a little bit closer than the moon is from here. Basically, if you drove into space at 80 miles per hour, it would take you 104 days to get to where you'd need to place the one yard sphere. The universe is unbelievably huge. If the Hubble Telescope aims at the dark places in the sky, hundreds of galaxies appear, each containing billions of stars. Billions of stars that are much further apart than the distance from here to Alnitak. Here's one of the many 'blank spaces' between stars: To scale models don't even work when you're talking about astronomical modeling. It's mind boggling if you think about it. Even for a troll.
With this scale of the Sun being a golf ball, the Earth (size of a grain of salt) travels 2.7 inches per day in orbit. In real life, Earth is constantly flying through space going around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. That means we travel more than a million miles every day.
My favorite "mind blown" stat about space: There are 10 times more stars in the heavens than there are GRAINS OF SAND on the planet earth.
Space big. Really big. You just won't believe how big space is! Somewhere in the universe, we just happened to pop into existence, survive for thousands of years overcoming so much strife and turmoil so that kids could snort tide pods and adults could argue about who stars in movies.
IMHO the next major threshold for mankind to overcome is FTL (Faster Than Light) technology. Only after this has been established will we be able to truly learn and explore the galaxy and universe. Unfortunately, to our current understanding, FTL is not possible.
Some things are just unknowable: what lies beyond the Planck length? Or the O'Brien time? Or at the center of the chin vortex?
It took a while to kick them pesky flat earthers out of here and now this fake news?? "Telescopes" can be faked. Earth is 5000 yrs old people!!
Who knows if these spaces are really blank or if we just are unable to see what is there. For example dark matter. Dark matter is believed to make up for 85% of the universe. We can only observe the 15%.
You'd like Deep Sky Videos on Youtube if you don't already watch it. It's all about deep sky objects. It's another one of Brady Haran's channels, and I really can't recommend any of his channels enough. This one originally started with the intent to do a video on every object in the Messier catalog (and it's still working on it), but it's branched out to cover all sorts of astronomy topics. It has a dynamite series of field trips to different telescopes all over the world as well. Very addictive.
