Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Some sense of size

Original post:  Dec 29, 2015

The Hubble Space Telescope has given us some of the clearest pictures yet of the wider universe. Earlier this year, NASA released an enormously detailed photo of the galaxy Andromeda. To give you some idea of just how large the photo is, NASA points out that it would take 600 HD TVs to display the image at full resolution!

The YouTube video below will help give you some small appreciation for the incredible size of our universe. An excerpt from a Vox article puts it into perspective:

As the video zooms deeper and deeper, remember that every single pinprick of light is a star — in most cases, scientists believe, a star orbited by its own planet (or planets).
Think of it this way: our Solar System is so big that we still haven't sent any spacecraftbeyond its borders. But it's replicated over and over, literally billions of times, in the Andromeda Galaxy. And Andromeda is just a single galaxy, relatively close to our Milky Way — both are part of a larger supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea.
Science can certainly be a mind-blowing experience.
Here is the link to the source article:  It's impossible to appreciate how vast the universe is. But this video will help. - Vox http://www.vox.com/2015/1/26/7915359/andromeda-galaxy-video

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