I come bearing gifts of our entirely awesome, awe-inspiring and, above all, GIANT universe.

From youtube: Star Size Comparison - starts with our Moon, and goes UP. For added benefit, play with the music.

There is also a .GIF, which says something similar, but a bit differently. Warning, it is LONG:

(source for both here)

Enjoy! *hearts on our universe*

This was basically my expression as the gif. progressed...

Take a look at this: http://htwins.net/scale/scale.swf

Very nice

I have the same thing as a single image:

I looked up some of those stars in the gif. The radius of VY Canis Majoris is 800X larger than the radius of our own sun which is approximately equal to the distance between the Sun and Saturn.

The sheer scale makes you feel insignifiant...

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well that surely made my life futile...















or nah...

You're saying that the big red thing on the 9th picture in the second column in the pic HNM posted... You're saying that that is only 800 times bigger compared to the tiny dot/fragment/pixel to the left of it? Our sun would fit more than 800 times on the small piece of VY Canis Majoris that is shown alone on the pic. That thing would be able to swallow our entire solar system for a good amount of centuries until it would be satisfied.

Either that or the pic is very misleading... >_>

VY Canis majoris is estimated to have a radius of up to 9.3 AU. The radius of our sun is 0.00464912633 AU. Estimates for its size vary but the largest esimate is around 2,000 times larger in radius than our sun. At the smallest estimate, VY Canis Majoris is 800 times larger in radius than the sun. Either way, its very huge.

For scale, here are the average distances of the planets (and dwarf planet) to the sun in AU. (I used 2,000X to estimate its distance as being comparable to the distance between the sun and saturn).

Mercury - 0.39
Venus - 0.72
Earth - 1.0
Mars - 1.5
Jupiter - 5.2
Saturn - 9.5
Uranus -19.2
Neptune - 30.1
Pluto - 39.5

The picture seems about right. If you were standing on Pluto, our own sun would not look any different than any of the other stars in the galaxy. Also, remember that I am talking about radius and not volume. In terms of volume, the star is 8,000,000,000 times larger.

The edges of the solar system strech for thousands of AU. There are massive clouds of dust and gas on the very outskirts of the solar system. The inner part of the Oort cloud is located from 2,000–20,000 AU (0.03–0.32 ly) from the sun and the outer part of the Oort cloud is about 20,000–50,000 AU (0.32–0.79 ly) from the sun.

This picture shows the sheer scale of the solar system:

This picture shows the different regions of the solar system:

*note that this is a logarithmic scale and not a linear scale.

I find it makes me happy - somewhere out there, there is life. Maybe they will get things right

The scale of things in the universe is utterly mind blowing

The next closest star, Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light-years, is a huge distance on the human scale. But on the scale of the universe, it's really nothing at all. You could spend hours just contemplating such things.