How big universe is ??:Incomprehensible Size

It has only been in recent decades, thanks to technological advancements, that humanity has been able to determine the approximate size of the universe. When describing it, measurements with values of billions and trillions are used—in light years, not miles. Analogies and descriptions can help one appreciate our comparative microscopic size in relation to the cosmos.

In Part Two of this series, we quantified the size of our solar system and galaxy. Doing the same with the universe is a much more difficult task—in fact, its actual size is unknown. All that can be measured is the visible universe (and even this value is not completely agreed upon). Generally speaking, it is thought that the visible cosmos is approximately 93 billion light years in diameter. Since each light year is 5.879 trillion miles, the diameter of the visible universe is 546,747,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles—546 billion trillion miles! It is impossible to fully comprehend a number of such proportions.

To make these distances more meaningful, we must shrink our universe to a more manageable scale. First, let’s reduce the Earth to the size of a grain of salt, making our planet 42.5 billion times smaller.

At this scale, the diameter of our solar system shrinks to less than 600 feet and our galaxy reduces to nearly 14 million miles across. Even at this scale, the visible universe is still 12.9 trillion miles wide.

Numbers this large are impossible to appreciate. Let’s reduce the scale even further.

If we could shrink our solar system from the Sun to Pluto down to the size of a single grain of salt, the Milky Way galaxy would be 24 miles in diameter—an easy distance to visualize. This still leaves the universe’s span at an incredible 22 million miles—about two-thirds the distance from Earth to Mars.

This number is still too large to envision. The scale must be reduced yet again.

If the Milky Way galaxy (in reality, nearly 600,000 billion miles in diameter) was reduced to the size of a grain of salt, the visible universe would be just over 915 feet wide—about the length of three American football fields. Finally, a size we can picture!

What is lost in this analogy is the sheer mass of the Milky Way galaxy and how much reduction is needed to reach this result. In fact, this manageable cosmic scale would mean we have reduced the universe 3.2 septillion times—or 3.2 trillion trillion times. Our solar system, never mind the Earth, would be smaller than a single hydrogen atom!