The scale of the Universe

An incredible visual tool at this website, showing the Universe in scale.

You use a scroll bar to zoom in and out. The scale goes from 1×10^-35 to 1×10^27. At each stage, you see objects of that size and can click on them for more detail.

The smallest item is quantum foam, which is slightly shorter than a planck length.

After that then a neutrino, which is around a yoctometer in length, or 1×10^-24. After that top quarks, and finally at 1×10^-15 you get protons and neutrons around a femtometer in size. Actual atoms get seen at just before 1×10^-10.

At the other end we have Pluto at 2,300 kms, the Moon at 3,500 kms, the USA at 4,200 kms and then Earth at 12,700 kms. Jupiter is at 140,000 kms, and the sun at 1.4m kms or 1.4 x 10^9.

Then the distance from Neptune to the Sun at 4,5b kms, larger than any known star. Voyager 1 is 17b kms from Earth. At 26b kms you have the distance light travels in a day. Sedna, the most remote object in our solar system is 140b kms from the sun which is .014 of a lightyear. Sedna takes 10,000 years to do a rotation around the sun.

The Oort Cloud is around 2 light years in size, or 2×10^18. Our closest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years away. The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy is  10,000 light years in size, while the Milky Way is 120,000 light years.

After that you have the Virgo Cluster at 30m light years, and the Virgo Supercluster at at 110m light years. Finally you have the Observable Universe at 93b light years, or 9.3×10^26 metres.

It’s a great tool to get people interested in science. Lots of fun and interesting facts.