Check this out: if you want to build a model galaxy to scale and you start with the Sun as a two-foot-diameter exercise ball, how far away do you have to travel before you can set down a smaller ball that represents Alpha Centauri, our nearest(-ish) stellar neighbor?
10,993.3 miles.
Just bask in that for a while.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/27/space-is-ful...
What an incredibly useless unit of measurement. They somehow found something worse than "olympic size swimming pools".
The problem is that most people just cannot conceptualize really, really, really large numbers, but journalists and authors try to make them more relatable anyway, and end up just making it worse.
I think what they meant to say was that it could make a typical globular cluster satellite of the Milky Way galaxy, containing about 225000 butter-stars with the same mass as our sun.
I don't think it was anything near that complex: 40 trillion trillion trillion is just the number of tubs of butter it takes to get 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes if you assume each tub is 250 grams.
10^3 = thousand
10^6 = million
10^9 = billion
10^12 = trillion
10^15 = quadrillion, or thousand trillion
10^18 = quintillion, or million trillion
10^21 = sextillion, or billion trillion
10^24 = heptillion, or trillion trillion
10^27 = octillion, or thousand trillion trillion
10^30 = nonillion, or million trillion trillion
10^33 = decillion, or billion trillion trillion
10^36 = undecillion, or trillion trillion trillion
And here I was, assuming each "pack of butter" was one of those 10g single-serving packs (although some are only 7.65g). I didn't check it against the "tonnes" number in the article. In the US, a "pack of butter" could also be a box containing 4 sticks 113 g each, totaling 454 grams, because butter in the US is sold by the pound. Apparently, they are 250g elsewhere.
And a (metric) tonne is already 1000 kg, or 1 Mg. There is also the long ton, which is 1016 kg, and the short ton, which is 907 kg.
The obfuscated number is therefore 1x10^40 g, which is even larger than standard metric prefixes can express, so we'd probably write it as 1x10^37 kg, for some reason.
So my previous math was wrong. That's 5 million butter-stars the size of our sun, or enough butter to form a slippery, spreadable black hole as massive as the one at the heart of our galaxy. I guess from this, we can calculate the size of Audthumbla the giant space-cow?