Re: Awe at the sheer number of them all

On May 18, 5:01 am, "Chris.Bee" <chri...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

The solar system is on the
subatomic scale compared with the distance to the nearest star.

It takes light eight minutes to go from the Sun to the Earth.

The semi-major axis of Neptune's orbit is about 30 astronomical units.
So it takes light ten days to go from the Sun to Neptune.

There are 365 days in a year, and the distance to Alpha Centauri is
4.3 light-years.

The diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years.

Let us say that someone were to build a large scale model of the Milky
Way Galaxy, a quarter of a mile in diameter. Not as big as the Solar
System model you visited.

On that scale, the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri would
be about two and a half inches... or six and a half centimeters.

The distance between the Sun and Neptune would be 0.2 millimeters.
Hardly subatomic.

However, the diameter of the Earth would be less than 6 nanometers.

The Bohr radius of the hydrogen atom - the distance from the proton at
which the electron would be orbiting in classical terms - is about
0.05 nanometers. So even a 6 nanometer wide Earth is _not quite_
subatomic.

That is not to say that the scale of the Universe is not deserving of
awe, but we shouldn't exaggerate.

By the way, on this same scale, a model of the Andromeda Galaxy, about
2.5 million light years away, would be... six miles away.

15 billion light years, once believed to be the radius of the
Universe, would be 36,000 miles, half again as far away as the
geostationary satellites that orbit the Earth.

John Savard
.

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