Our Tiny Place in the Enormous Cosmos (Video)

Size Spectrum of Celestial Bodies in the Known Universe

This informative video answers a simple question—just how big can astronomical bodies get? Or more precisely, how small is the planet we live on compared with them?

The video uses information gathered from observations about the known universe, and compares the sizes of various planets and stars.

The spectrum begins with what we might consider a big object: the moon orbiting our planet. Then comes Mercury which is a little bigger, after it Mars, and Venus and Earth which are similar size.

After Earth, the scale increases dramatically to Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter. Then we see how enormous our sun is compared with all the other objects in our solar system.

From here on, it’s all about star with each one significantly larger than the previous one. As the footage progresses, we become more and more aware of how truly tiny our place in the universe is.

Finally, we see the largest known star, VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant with a diameter of approximately 1.7 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers).

To give us a sense of its enormity, the Earth is shown as a dot above its glowing surface, and compared to a passenger jet that would take 1,100 years to fly around it once!

Unless you are an astronaut, everything you have ever known and experienced happened on this little planet, a literal speck of dust compared to the immensity of other objects in our universe.