5 ms·
Wikipedia has a nice size analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision?wprov=sfti1#Stellar_collisions https://en.wikipedia.org/w
by superfish 1y ago
Wikipedia has a nice size analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision?wprov=sfti1#Stellar_collisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
> […] if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, […] the average distance between stars […] is analogous to one ping-pong ball every 3.2 km (2 mi).
Intuitively this visualization actually makes it seem like stars are pretty close? Usually with galactic dimensions it’s hard for our mere monkey minds to grasp the scales but this is actually pretty easy to imagine.
- snickerbockers 1y agoThat's because you're significantly larger than the pingpong ball.
- nandomrumber 1y agoSol is about 1.39 million kilometres in diameter. A table tennis ball is 40mm in diameter. That makes the sun about 34,750,000,000 times bigger than a pingpong ball.
- fecal_henge 1y agoI find some of these numbers hard to believe sometimes. 40 mm seems really big for a table tennis ball.
- a_shoeboy 1y agoIt's 0.00019884 furlongs, if that helps.
- nandomrumber 1y agoOr 0.0008 OSP (Olympic Swimming Pools) Edit to add: length, not volume
- Rooster61 1y agoOr 0.000587613 smoots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
- petee 1y agoWe really can't grasp just how large the sun is either; the earth would be a grain of sand in that scale. To me that still feels pretty vast