Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive. How to Picture the Size of the Universe. IDL TIFF fileSpace, as Douglas Adams once so aptly wrote, is big.To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you.
If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state (or possibly country) over.Attempting to imagine distances larger than this quickly becomes troublesome. At this scale, the Milky Way galaxy would be 7.5 million miles across, or more than 30 times the distance between the Earth and the moon. As you can see, these are rather inhuman dimensions that are almost impossible to really get a sense of.But that doesn’t mean it’s completely impossible. Astronomers have made observations and simulations that in some way capture the enormity of our cosmos. Mankind’s most distant probe prepares to leave the Solar System. "2nd Voyager Spacecraft Lifts Off Smoothly, Speeds Toward Jupiter" was the headline chosen by the New York Times to document the 1977 launch of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which, despite its name, launched soon after its counterpart, Voyager 2. The craft weighed just 1,592 lbs on Earth--less than a small car--and launched without incident.
It's mission, according to an article in the same paper, was as follows: "To fly to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and possibly Neptune. "