30 ms·

This coupled with the size of the largest stars is truly mind-boggling (much less the size of the universe or the size of a quark). It's amazing how we humans,

• algorias 17y ago
  But there's a difference between being able to reason about the magnitude of a number theoretically, and actually visualizing such a distance in your mind, which I find incredibly hard to do. 11 miles radius at a resolution of one pixel's width. That's like visualizing an entire city, from close enough to distinguish cracks in the sidewalks.
• berntb 17y ago
  Interesting, the diameter of the Earth is about 12,000 km. The distance to the Sun is about 150 million km. The Hydrogen atom is much "larger", in comparision. If you really want a mindf-ck, check Avogadro's number (6.022 * 10^23), the number of atoms in 12 grams of C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant Then compare that to the number of stars in our galaxy multiplied by the number of known galaxies... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy Edit: I might add that I learned the above from a chemistry course book. More sense of wonder than when I read about the Orion project; almost as when I learned where atoms heavier than Helium comes from.