How big is the universe?

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Tess Jaffe

Sometimes we can get a sense of the immensity of the universe from mundane things. The odometer on my 10 year old car is approaching 186,000 miles. That’s about as far as light goes in a single second. It takes light about 1.5 seconds to go from the Earth to the Moon, so I haven’t even gone as far as the nearest celestial body. The solar system is small potatoes though. To get to the very nearest objects that someone using SkyView is likely to want to look at, it takes light over 4 years, over 120 million seconds. That’s a billion years of driving. I don’t think the warranty will hold out!

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4 Responses to How big is the universe?

  1. Aiden says:
    February 21, 2012 at 4:07 am

    Hi Tom and Laura,

    It’s been a while since I last visited your blog. How come you quit posting? Anyway, thank you for all the previous posts and pictures.

    Regards,
    Aiden

  2. Tom McGlynn says:
    February 29, 2012 at 12:37 pm

    Hi Aiden,

    Over the past serveral months Laura and I have been focused on the release of the HEASARC’s new query service (see http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xaminintro), so not much has been happening with SkyView. Now that that’s launched we can hope to make more frequent updates here.

    Tom

  3. Tezcan says:
    March 5, 2012 at 3:57 pm

    Thank you for your contribution.

  4. mark says:
    May 27, 2012 at 8:27 pm

    well let us put it this way, i like to think the universe is like, GOD. He is so
    Big, He is inside your mind, now wait for it. He is out side of your mind.

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