27 Images That Will Help You Better Understand The Size Of The Earth
So you left your umbrella at home got soaked on your way to the bus stop – your day can’t get any worse, right? And, while we can’t provide you with a dry shirt and pants, we can provide you with something to distract you from your agony.
Today, we’ve compiled a collection of photographs that demonstrate how little our planet is in comparison to the rest of the cosmos. And we’re confident they’ll make your troubles appear so insignificant that you’ll realize they’re not even worth sweating over.
This is our home planet, Earth.
It is shown here alongside the other seven planets of our solar system.
Our 4.568 billion-year-old solar system is made up of eight planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), three minor planets (Ceres, Pluto, and Eris), and the Sun. If you don’t count every asteroid and moon contained inside it.
Calculating the distance between Earth and the moon – doesn’t seem so far, does it?
It turns out that you can fit every planet in the solar system in that space!
When it comes to the Solar System, Jupiter is the king.; here’s how small North America appears in comparison.
When we say Jupiter is vast, we mean it. Here are some figures to help you realize how large it is: The radius of the Earth is 6371.0 km (3958.8 mi), while Jupiter’s radius is 69,911 km (43,441 mi). It has a surface area of 6.14191010 km2 (2.37141010 sq mi), making it nearly 122 times larger than Earth!
Then there’s Saturn; here’s how huge it is in comparison to Earth.
This is how Saturn’s rings might appear if they were put around Earth.
Just in case you thought we’d forgotten about Pluto, here’s how we can view it now versus how we could 14 years ago.
Remember when Pluto was called a planet in school? All of that changed in 2006, when it was classed as a dwarf rather than a planet.
An artist imagined how Rosetta’s Comet (67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko) would seem in comparison to downtown Los Angeles. Isn’t that a massive space rock?
If you thought Jupiter was massive, wait until you see the Sun.
The Sun has a surface area of 6.091012 km2, which is equivalent to 12,000 Earths! Here are some more interesting facts:
The Sun’s light takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach Earth.
The Sun is composed of 73.46% hydrogen, 24.85% helium, and minute amounts of oxygen, carbon, and other elements.
Every second, the Sun converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium, resulting in the conversion of 4 million tons of matter into energy.
Here’s how Earth appears from the Moon’s surface.
And this is how it appears from Mars.
…and from behind Saturn’s rings, it appears rather little, doesn’t it?
From 2.9 billion miles distant, just beyond Neptune, Earth seems to be no larger than a grain of salt.
Here’s how Earth appears in relation to the Sun.
When viewed from the surface of Mars, it seems to be a small speck.
Another interesting fact: there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on every beach on the planet.
This suggests that there are much larger stars out there than our sun. Here’s the Sun in comparison to VY Canis Majoris.
VY Canis Majoris would almost reach Saturn’s orbit if placed in the center of our solar system.
If we reduced the Sun to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way would be roughly the size of the continental United States.
Suddenly, the Earth appears to be much smaller.
Looking up at the night sky, you may see thousands of stars, which are only a small percentage of the stars in the universe.
If you thought the Milky Way was big, take a look at how it compares to IC 1101, which is 1.04 billion light-years away.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the thousands of galaxies that surround us.
Most of them are so far away that humans may never be able to visit them, such as UDF 423, which is 7.7 billion light-years away.
The stars in the night sky are only a small part of the entire universe.
Finally, there are black holes. Here’s how one looks in comparison to Earth’s orbit – that’s really frightening.
