Scale of the Universe

[MarkBC]

Another one of my posts that has nothing to do with camping...

But I think this link is very clever and cool, so I thought I'd share. Click on the link below!

"Scale of the Universe"

An interactive site that allows you to explore examples of every size scale: down to the smallest -- "strings" (assuming they exist...you have to drill down a lot of scales to find that ultimate smallest) -- and up to the largest -- the whole universe.
This screen-grab shows the starting point, the human order-of-magnitude:

Use the slider at the bottom (at the link, not on the image above) to zoom in and out.

The interaction is based on Flash, so probably not viewable on iOS.

(you'll have to endure a few seconds of commercial ad when you access the site.)
I saw this on the always-interesting "What's hot on Google+" this morning.

 

[Mark W. Ingalls]

Another one of my posts that has nothing to do with camping...

But I think this link is very clever and cool, so I thought I'd share. Click on the link below!

"Scale of the Universe"

An interactive site that allows you to explore examples of every size scale: down to the smallest -- "strings" (assuming they exist...you have to drill down a lot of scales to find that ultimate smallest) -- and up to the largest -- the whole universe.
This screen-grab shows the starting point, the human order-of-magnitude:

Use the slider at the bottom (at the link, not on the image above) to zoom in and out.

The interaction is based on Flash, so probably not viewable on iOS.

(you'll have to endure a few seconds of commercial ad when you access the site.)
I saw this on the always-interesting "What's hot on Google+" this morning.


"Yoctometers" ... hm-m-m-m-m ... that's a technical term?

Smallest feature --> Neutrino @ 10-24 m.
Largest feature --> Hubble Deep Field @ 1025 m.

So on average, we're about average.

HighZ?

 

[EdoHart]

That's such a cool link that I bookmarked it. Thanks.

Here's a related video:

 

[MarkBC]

Here's a related video: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=HEheh1BH34Q

This is cool, too, EdoHart. Thanks!
I saw a version of this recently, but didn't look closely enough at it...I played this one all the way through. Wow!

The scale of the universe is something I've been exposed to enough (in TV programs and a few books) that I've long accepted that it's impossible to grasp (by "gut feel", I mean -- I understand intellectually what the numbers mean).
What's newly-surprising to me is that even if I just focus on individual objects in the universe -- stars -- the span of their scales is still more-or-less beyond grasping.

(I'm no astronomer...but I thought I was a bit of an astronomy buff, and yet I've never heard of "hypergiant" stars -- I remember when "supergiant" was big)

 

[MarkBC]

Speaking of astronomy and TV...
...I highly recommend two BBC series -- rebroadcast in the USA on the Science Channel in 2010 and 2011:
"Wonders of the Solar System" and "Wonders of the Universe", hosted by physicist Brian Cox.
(two separate series, but accessed by the same link at the Science Channel).

Professor Cox is pretty cool -- he's a real research physicist (and university professor), so he actually understands what he's saying in the series (not just a narrator reading a script). And he seems to have a genuine "wonder" for the universe which comes across in his presentation of the material.
The material isn't the latest-thing-physics of some of Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Cosmos", but it's all real science, and it does include stuff that isn't common knowledge, such as why entropy defines the "arrow of time".
Even though I was already familiar with most of the content it's so well-presented -- kinda fun, even -- that I've enjoyed watching episodes more than once.

Did I mention, "recommended"?

 

[highz]

"Yoctometers" ... hm-m-m-m-m ... that's a technical term?

Smallest feature --> Neutrino @ 10-24 m.
Largest feature --> Hubble Deep Field @ 1025 m.

So on average, we're about average.

HighZ?



Ummm, OK. An astronomer weighs in. Personally I think "yoctometer" sounds like a device that measures the intensity of laughter, but yeah, it's a real SI unit. And it's not by chance that the human scale is at the middle of the range of measurement. Man really is the measure of all things. We first started measuring the things around us that did not need microscopes or telescopes to see, so something that is roughly our size is very naturally of the order 100 .

I saw the "Scale of the Universe" flash tool yesterday for the first time and thought it was very cool, also. But, I was personally disappointed that they didn't include the "Sloan Great Wall", not just because it was the project I work on that discovered it, but because it is currently the largest known physical structure in the Universe at about 1.3 x 1025 m long. The Hubble deep field size is just the size of the region the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute decided to observe - it doesn't have a fundamental physical meaning. So, I think the Sloan Great Wall would be better to use (not that I'm prejudiced or anything).

Hyperstars = hyperbole? When I first started learning about astronomy, supergiants were the largest stars in the textbooks. But, there are a very few extremely massive and extremely rare supergiant stars that have been given this name. They are at the very limit of the mass a star can possibly have. If a gas cloud with significantly more mass than this contracted by gravitation to form a protostar, and kept contracting until temperature and pressure started hydrgen fusion in the core (the birth of a star), there would be so much matter fusing hydrogen and releasing energy that radiation pressure would overcome the pull of gravity and blow the nascent star apart (or at least reduce it's mass to a normal star's level). These hypergiants at the upper limit of the mass range are able to keep themselves together, but even so, the more massive the star, the faster they fuse their hydrogen fuel. This means hypergiants have the shortest lifespan of all stars. No original hypergiant (from the first generation of stars in our Galaxy) still exists. The very few known to exist must have formed recently (astronomically speaking) out of what gas is left over. That's why they are so rare. Practically speaking there's not a hard dividing line between a supergiant and a hypergiant. Most astronomers consider a supergiant with a particular broadened hydrogen feature in the star's spectrum to be a hypergiant. That broadened spectral signature indicates mass is being lost from the star at a high rate, which means the star's outer layers have expanded out so far that gravity's force is much less than the radiation pressure. Which means the star must be really, really big, and really, really luminous. My personal area of research is quasars and active galaxies, not stellar evolution, so if I've left out details, apologies. Likewise, if this is more than you wanted to know, apologies.

Cool links, guys!

 

[MarkBC]

I saw the "Scale of the Universe" flash tool yesterday for the first time and thought it was very cool, also. But, I was personally disappointed that they didn't include the "Sloan Great Wall", not just because it was the project I work on that discovered it, but because it is currently the largest known physical structure in the Universe at about 1.3 x 1025 m long........

Thanks for the expert input, highz!
How can you retire from such fascinating work? (yeah, I know how... )

By the way: The Sloan Great Wall is included -- maybe you didn't zoom out far enough. The zoom ends at the scale of "observable universe".
Here's a screen grab of the scale at which "Sloan" is included:



Whenever I get depressed thinking about how ordinary our little old Sun is...I console myself with the knowledge that it'll be around for billions of years, rather than just a few million.

 

[highz]

You're right! I did miss the Great Wall. My bad. I did see the observable universe edge frame, so I must have skipped right over it.

It still makes me pause when I recall that we humans are a tiny piece of the Universe that wonders about the Universe. In other words, we are the Universe becoming self-aware.

 

[MarkBC]

It still makes me pause when I recall that we humans are a tiny piece of the Universe that wonders about the Universe. In other words, we are the Universe becoming self-aware.

True true....and mind-boggling. Makes you start thinking about the nature of consciousness...

(Brian Cox, in one of those Wonders of the Universe episodes, makes that observation, too. It's the kind of "wonder" comment that makes me like that series.)

 

[highz]

True true....and mind-boggling. Makes you start thinking about the nature of consciousness...

(Brian Cox, in one of those Wonders of the Universe episodes, makes that observation, too. It's the kind of "wonder" comment that makes me like that series.)




I haven't seen the Brian Cox series, but I just checked Netflix, and they are in my queue now.

 

[Mark W. Ingalls]

This ignurant dumas engineer saw "Sloan Great Wall" without even wondering what it was. Shameful...

 

[Mark W. Ingalls]

Forming the quotient of the really big and the really small...

[Wikipedia - observable universe] Two approximate calculations give the number of atoms in the observable universe to be close to 1080

 

[highz]

Forming the quotient of the really big and the really small...

Whoa. And thanks for posting that Wikipedia link. There's some good stuff there. Y'know, it's an unfortunate reality that at work I spend too much of my time dealing with software bugs, survey efficiency metrics, problems with data acquisition and analysis and the bureaucracy that comes with maintaining a survey. And most pure research scientists I know are focused on publishing results on their small piece of the puzzle. The talk at conferences isn't usually about the wonder of it all, but the details of research. It's mainly when I can get away with the camper and sit outside at night after a day spent with the Earth that the wonder comes back. Or, when I read or hear an eloquent popular science article (and not just in astronomy) that puts it all back in perspective. We need folks who can take the detailed research results and build the big picture. I think we owe a big debt to the popular science writers.

 

[4llamas]

highz said:" Which means the star must be really, really big, and really, really luminous."

Whoa. I was tracking right along until you got all techie at the end.

More fascinating than dinosaurs. I think the best job title I ever heard of is Theoretical Astrophysicist.

 

[MarkBC]

Here's another way to see the Scale of the Universe, though this one is just on the astronomical side of the scale (the big-and-bigger stuff) and doesn't feature live zooming:
Earth's Location in the Universe

(screencapture of thumbnails below -- click on the link above to get to the full-size images)

This showed up on What's Hot on Google+ this morning, but you don't have to be a member of Google+ (Google's answer to Facebook) to view it.

 

[highz]

My iPad's Safari browser crashed on the last image (observable universe). I guess it just couldn't comprehend the scale.

 

[MarkBC]

Other than the Magellanic Clouds (which I enjoyed seeing 20 years ago on a vacation in New Zealand -- my only trip south of the equator

), I didn't realize there were all those dwarf galaxies "nearby"...I'd never heard of dwarf galaxies before, until looking at that Local Galactic Group image.

I see in this Wikipedia entry for Local Group that many of these dwarfs are satellites of the Milky Way...

(It seems odd to me that on Wikipedia "Local Group" refers to this group of galaxies without "disambiguation".
Odd because, for example, if you read in the news that "local group is meeting to discuss transit issues" I bet that no galaxies would be in attendance, and yet on Wikipedia, "Local Group" means-and-only-means "group of galaxies that includes Earth's Milky Way" and Andromeda and 54 dwarf galaxies. Maybe the IAU has trademarked/copyright the name "Local Group" so that it has to mean that.

)

 

[highz]

There are still low surface brightness satellites to the Galaxy being discovered. Also, some of them have merged with the Milky Way, and those mergers are a current area of research.

Re. The Local Group, it's all in the capital letters...that makes "Local Group" a proper noun. It's the same as "Galaxy". If you capitalize it, it means the Milky Way Galaxy.

 

[MarkBC]

From TED (no, not our Ted) comes an entertaining (well, nerdertaining) description of "scale" on the small end.

click:
"Just how small is an atom?"

(Answer: "Really, really, really small"...and most macro matter is really, really, really empty.)

This animated video moves very fast -- maybe too fast to catch it all, but since it's a video it can be stopped and replayed.

Nothing new here, really, but still totally mind-boggling...and that's without even descending to the scale of components of the components of the atom.