How small we really are
That's our solar system taken care of. Now we'll see how our sun compares in size to other stars in our galaxy. Remember, when you look up at the night sky, every single star you can see is from our galaxy the Milky Way.
The typing on the picture above is quite small. Our Sun is the tiny sphere on the left. It also says that Jupiter is about one pixel at this scale and Earth is invisible.
The typing on the picture below is also too small in places to read. The stars in order of size starting with the largest first are, Antares, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Rigel, Arcturus, Pollux, Sirius and then our Sun which would take up all of one pixel. Jupiter would be invisible at this scale.
Feeling small yet? Below is a picture taken towards the centre of our galaxy. It is estimated that our galaxy alone has at least 200,000,000,000 stars in it (200 billion) and possibly up to 400 billion. From Earth the naked eye can see about 8,000 of the stars within our galaxy.
The Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter. That means it would take light 100,000 years to travel from one side of the Milky Way to the other, whereas it only takes eight minutes for light to reach us from our Sun. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second which in turn means;-
11,176,920 miles per minute
670,615,200 miles per hour
16,094,764,000 miles per day
112,663,353,600 miles per week
5,858,494,387,200 miles per year
So to get a rough diameter of the Milky Way multiply the distance travelled by light in one year by the estimated diameter of 100,000 light years;-
5,858,494,387,200 x 100,000 = 585,849,438,720,000,000 miles
Below is a picture of how we believe our galaxy, the Milky Way, looks if seen from far away in our universe. The Milky Way is thought to be a barred spiral galaxy. An estimation has also been made as to roughly where our solar system fits within our galaxy.
Our galaxy is just one of billions in the known universe. In 2004 the Hubble Space Telescope stared for three months at an apparently blank piece of space to look towards the edge of our universe. Below is the image it took. About 10,000 galaxies were found in this image when it was studied. Some of these galaxies formed 13 billion years ago. The area of sky shown in this image is so small that you would need to take another 12,700,000 images of the same size to complete a picture of the whole sky.
Remember, there are billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars of their own. To say we are insignificant is possibly the biggest understatement anyone could make.