“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
— from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Size of Space, a creation of Neal Agarwal, is the latest in the never-ending series of visualizations meant to show you how big space is. Starting at human scale with an astronaut, this site walks you through a set of increasingly large objects, from asteroids to moons to planets to stars (and reminds us of tiny the sun is compared to stars like Rigel, which in turn is dwarfed by Betelgeuse). It goes on to cover nebulae, supernova remnants, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and finally, the observable universe (about 93 billion light years across).
If you’re not in the mood for swiping left or right (or using the arrow keys) to see the size of space, there’s this video, which covers similar objects and even gives you their sizes:
And finally, there’s the granddaddy of videos of scale: Powers of Ten, produced by the legendary Charles and Ray Eames for IBM:
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