APOD: The Scale of the Universe: Interactive (2014 Jan 12)

[APOD Robot]

The Scale of the Universe: Interactive

Explanation: What does the universe look like on small scales? On large scales? Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but every huge galaxy is different. On more familiar scales, a small glass table top to a human is a vast plane of strange smoothness to a dust mite -- possibly speckled with cell boulders. Not all scale lengths are well explored -- what happens to the smallest mist droplets you sneeze, for example, is a topic of active research -- and possibly useful to know to help stop the spread of disease. The above interactive flash animation, a modern version of the classic video Powers of Ten, is a new window to many of the known scales of our universe. By moving the scroll bar across the bottom, you can explore a diversity of sizes, while clicking on different items will bring up descriptive information.

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[Ann]

Ah yes, this is one of the most delightful APODs ever!

Welcome back!

Ann

[Mactavish]

Aye, it’s a long way to Tipperary!

[Beyond]

And Gomez's hamburger But a lot further to Yotta-land

[John Grant]

This is by far the most inspirational page to ever come down the NASA pipe. We treasure this site, and NASA, and all the people whose efforts go into us being able to click a few times and see things like this.

From the bottoms of our hearts to the centers of our brains, THANK YOU.

[4dmaze]

If you click on Betelgeuse, it mentions that the star will be short-lived and may not live another 10,000 years. Then it says that smaller stars live for trillions of years. That must be a mistake, correct?

[Boomer12k]

Absolutely fascinating, you could explore it for hours, or even take a day...

Quantum foam????

:---[===] *

[supamario]

Fantastic!
The best example of "Powers of Ten" to date. Interactive too.
Love it.
Thank you very much.

[metamorphmuses]

This thing is so addictive!

[neufer]

If you click on Betelgeuse, it mentions that the star will be short-lived and may not live another 10,000 years. Then it says that smaller stars live for trillions of years. That must be a mistake, correct?

<<A red dwarf is a small and relatively cool star on the main sequence, either late K or M spectral type. Red dwarfs range in mass from a low of 0.075 solar masses (the upper limit for a brown dwarf) to about 50% of the Sun and have a surface temperature of less than 4,000 K.

Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Milky Way galaxy, at least in the neighborhood of the Sun, but due to their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot easily be observed. From Earth, not one is visible to the naked eye. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is a red dwarf (Type M5, apparent magnitude 11.05), as are twenty of the next thirty nearest. According to some estimates, red dwarfs make up three-quarters of the stars in our galaxy.

As late-type red dwarfs are fully convective, helium does not accumulate at the core and, compared to larger stars such as the Sun, they can burn a larger proportion of their hydrogen before leaving the main sequence. As a result, red dwarfs have estimated lifespans far longer than the present age of the universe, and stars with less than 0.8 solar masses have not had time to leave the main sequence. The lower the mass of a red dwarf, the longer the lifespan. It is believed that the lifespan of these stars exceeds the expected 10 billion year lifespan of our Sun by the third or fourth power of the ratio of the solar mass to their masses; thus a red dwarf with 0.1 solar mass may continue burning for 10 trillion years. As the proportion of hydrogen in a red dwarf is consumed, the rate of fusion declines and the core starts to contract. The gravitational energy generated by this size reduction is converted into heat, which is carried throughout the star by convection.>>

[Gowron]

This makes me cry every single time!

[geckzilla]

This makes me cry every single time!

That's not very becoming of a Klingon...

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

This makes me cry every single time!

That's not very becoming of a Klingon...

[BMAONE23]

If you click on Betelgeuse, it mentions that the star will be short-lived and may not live another 10,000 years. Then it says that smaller stars live for trillions of years. That must be a mistake, correct?

There is a line from "Blade Runner"
"The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long"
This also applies to stars and wood burning stoves
smaller stars just ember along at a slow and steady pace

[Starchild]

I'm just surprised we're still around to be able to discuss this - relatively speaking we're not much bigger than a quark, compared to the (known) universe! Amazing little video!!! (I looked at everything, took me about an hour or so).

[tom2688]

absolutely, completely mind blowing. it puts a complete new view of what and where I live, and how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. WOW. CUDOS TO THOSE THAT PUT THIS TOGETHER!!! I am so impressed.

[saturno2]

Very very interesting

[Ann]

I'm just surprised we're still around to be able to discuss this - relatively speaking we're not much bigger than a quark, compared to the (known) universe! Amazing little video!!! (I looked at everything, took me about an hour or so).

Here's where I don't agree with you. The universe is indeed unfathomably, absolutely inconceivably big, which is one of the things I love about it. But that doesn't make us humans comparable to quarks in size. Indeed, quarks are about as far removed from our "pigeonhole size" as we are removed from the universe.

We are "mid-sized", and we can neither grasp the size of the universe nor the size of quarks.

Ann

[Cousin Ricky]

The image of the Virgo Cluster (which shows M84 and M86) is not to scale. It only shows a small portion of the cluster, and that portion is shown too large.

Otherwise, this is an awesome work! I learned a lot from it.

The scariest part is that if I look hard enough, I should be able to see dust mites crawling all over my bed.

[neufer]

We are "mid-sized", and we can neither grasp the size of the universe nor the size of quarks.

Composite particles (e.g., atoms, protons, neutrons, mesons, etc.) do have an actual physical size.

However, fundamental particles (e.g., quarks, gluons, electrons, muons, etc.) are point particles
without an actual physical size but with a Compton wavelength

and (sometimes) with a smaller EM classical radius.

On the other hand the size of the universe could be infinite;
all we really know is the age of the universe which corresponds to an artificial size.

[tomatoherd]

Isn't this a mistake? :
near the end, at the universe level, it has the distance to the Hubble Deep Field being 12.7 billion light years. But this is within the "observable universe" circle that has an apparent diameter of roughly 8 times the Deep Field linear pictograph. Even if we put the Milky Way at the center, we do not observe 4 times 12.7 billion light years distant.

[Chris Peterson]

Isn't this a mistake? :
near the end, at the universe level, it has the distance to the Hubble Deep Field being 12.7 billion light years. But this is within the "observable universe" circle that has an apparent diameter of roughly 8 times the Deep Field linear pictograph. Even if we put the Milky Way at the center, we do not observe 4 times 12.7 billion light years distant.

The most distant objects we see (near the edge of the observable universe) are about 46 billion light years away. That's the physical distance you get when you combine 13 billion light travel years with 13 billion years of universal expansion.

[jamesosb]

Isn't this a mistake? :
near the end, at the universe level, it has the distance to the Hubble Deep Field being 12.7 billion light years. But this is within the "observable universe" circle that has an apparent diameter of roughly 8 times the Deep Field linear pictograph. Even if we put the Milky Way at the center, we do not observe 4 times 12.7 billion light years distant.

The most distant objects we see (near the edge of the observable universe) are about 46 billion light years away. That's the physical distance you get when you combine 13 billion light travel years with 13 billion years of universal expansion.

This threw me off, as well. I did research on the HDF back in 2002 and was thinking the known universe is just under 14 billion LY in radius. But then remembered we typically just referred to how far something was by its age, not calculated distance. (Actually, more common was to just refer to its redshift.) The furthest thing we can observe is about 14 billion light years old. But in the time it took the light to reach us, it has continued to recede, so we can infer the current distance to that object. There's a good explanation of this in this article I found as a reference on Wikipedia (Check out the references in the "Universe" Wikipedia article).
Lineweaver, Charles; Tamara M. Davis (2005). "Misconceptions about the Big Bang". Scientific American

[Filbo]

I noticed an error and some fudging at the largest scale (the fudging is probably duplicated throughout the scale range which refers to LY). The estimated size of the universe is given as 160 billion LY == 1.6e27 m, while the size of the observable universe is given as 93 billion LY == 9.3e28 m. The latter is 100x too large; it should be e26. These are also fudged according to a conversion factor of "1 LY == 1e16 m"; using a correct conversion (1 LY == ~9.46e15 m) and the same precision, these numbers would be given as 1.5e27 and 8.8e26 m, respectively.

The error which makes the observable universe 58x the size of the whole universe ought to be corrected!

>Bela<

[Chris Peterson]

The error which makes the observable universe 58x the size of the whole universe ought to be corrected!

The bigger error is in assigning any value for the size of the Universe, which is somewhere between the size of the observable universe and infinitely large... and no current theory allows that to be narrowed down very much.