Scale of the universe (flash) | Hacker News Reader

Scale of the universe (flash)

primaxstudio.com

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The knowledge that these orders of magnitude exist is one of the great gifts of science to humankind.

Check out the size of the giant earthworm. 7 meters. Yeesh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchaetus_rappi

This is like the modern Powers of Ten(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z53wTtGGA0)

Beautifully done.

This animation and that video always make me pause and contemplate the significance of the little websites I work on and their role in the universe.

I see something like this every now and again, but this has to be the best in a while for giving the sense of scale. Its a shame the information on the lower scales contains guesswork like preons and strings.

Love, love, love this.

Was surprised (which only shows my ignorance) of the sizes of some stars, compared to 1 AU.

Also - how is the estimation of the size of the universe (not the /observable/ universe) done?

I would imagine it's done using some kind of estimate of the known current rate of expansion and assuming some kind of model for the rate of acceleration.

I thought that if the universe is "open" then it is only the visible universe that is finite, and the rest is actually infinite. i.e. there's stars "all the way" it's just that we can only see stuff 14 billion light years away.

Another point: in one part it says "we are probably not at the center" - I thought the notion of a "center of the universe" was meaningless in the same sense that any point on a sphere is not "the center" (if the universe is "closed"), and you can't have a "center" of an infinite plane (if the universe is "open").

Also he mentions preons, hypothetical particles of which quarks are made, which I believe is an idea mostly done away with.

Stars all the way = infinite amount of stars = infinite mass = doesn't make any sense

At least that's how I understand it... but IANAC

Yeah I was wondering about that, too. The funny thing is the universe is supposed to be 13.73 billion years old but even wikipedia states 93 billion light years as a size estimate.

A reasonable way to calculate the size of the universe is to first calculate its age, and then assume expansion at the speed of light. Age can be determined by a number of factors, including calculating the age of the oldest stars we observe, using objects such as Cepheid variable stars (whose brightness is a function of time), and measuring relative velocities of distant galaxies to then figure out when they started moving (Big Bang).

Very nice! Everyone should show this to their kids as soon as they can grasp it.

Makes you wonder how people can have the gall to suggest that humans have any sort of purpose.

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