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Cosmology and astronomy
Course: Cosmology and astronomy > Unit 1
Lesson 1: Scale of earth, sun, galaxy and universeScale of the galaxy
Scale of the Galaxy. Created by Sal Khan.
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- If as Sal said atis correct, then if we somehow beat the speed of light and travel 10 lightyears away from Earth (in one second presumablly), then when we gaze at Earth, in a very powerfull telescope, will we see it as it was 10 years ago? 5:08(164 votes)
- Yes, it is the illusion made by the Finite speed of light. If you were 80 light years away, you would see WWII. If you were 230 light years away, you would see the Revolutionary war. If you were 100 million light years away, you would see dinosaurs.(212 votes)
- - Does anyone know what that huge star is called on the bottom left of the video. its super bright, and NOTICEABLE.plz rate this question up because other people dont know.... :) 12:24
If i could get more answers, it would easier to decide on an appropriate answer... thanks!!!!!!!!!!!(37 votes)- It's not the north star or any star in fact. There are no stars in that area that appear that bright to us. It was probably the moon or a planet like Venus or Jupiter. The bright spot lies close to the ecliptic - the path in the sky that planets and the moon show up in - and those objects are the only ones that appear that bright to us from Earth.(30 votes)
- does NASA have the technology that can send a probe to the other side of the Milky Way? If so, wouldn't they have found life there and didn't notify the people? The univerese itself is expanding as we know it and it gets bigger and bigger. Space and time are starting to get a little hard.(12 votes)
- The center of the Milky Way is about 25,000 light years away from the earth. The “other side” of the Milky Way is more like 75,000 light years away. That means that even travelling at the speed of light it would take 25,000 years for NASA to get a probe just to the center of the Milky Way and another 25,000 years for anything they learned to get back to the Earth. Humanity was hunting and gathering food, using stone tools, and living in caves 50,000 years ago, not sending probes into the Milky Way.(54 votes)
- What are the galaxies made of?(13 votes)
- Galaxies are made up of stars, clusters, planets, and mostly meteorites and chunks of ice(4 votes)
- They think that there is a massive black hole at the center of the Milky-way, how comes that it is depicted as a son? There is so much light in the center and I thought light can not escape a black hole.(9 votes)
- Don't confuse the center bulge of the galaxy, which is composed of billions of stars and dust also orbiting, with the black hole which lies at the very center. The size of the event horizon is very small, about the size of Mercury's orbit. Milky Way's center bulge is several thousand light years across.(7 votes)
- In the diagram where Sal talks about our sun's neighborhood, what do the colors represent? Why is ALTAIR is blue and EPSILON ERIDANI is yellow?(7 votes)
- A stars color depends on its heat. The Sun is moderately hot so it is yellow. Many other stars as cooler and are red or orange. A few are hotter and are white or blue.(6 votes)
- If there are so many billion stars in our galaxy (and in the ones surrounding). Why is it that when we look at the sky at night, we are still able to see plenty of darkness between all the stars?(5 votes)
- Since they are so far away, by the time they reach our puny eyes, a lot of the light would have red shifted to the point our eyes can detect any light.(4 votes)
- So when he is talking about seeing stars we are actually seeing what that star looked liked ten thousand years ago. Does that mean if we are ever able to build a spaceship that is capable of getting humans to the closest star. We are techinclly going into the future and when we come back to earth we are traveling back in time?(6 votes)
- Not really going to the future, it's that all we have ever seen is the past. We go there and see something different because the past is different from the present. And no, i am not Confucious.(3 votes)
- i am a bit confused, Sal said that when we look at a far of star/solar system it has already changed its position as it took the light, X years to reach us, so howcome we just see through a telescope and look at the stars at their current position?(5 votes)
- When you look through a telescope you do not see the current position of the object you are looking at. You see it as it was in the past.
The reality of the situation is that we don't see anything in it's current state. If you look at your computer screen, you don't see it as it is now, you see it as it was a very short time ago. The time difference depends on how far light has to travel until it gets into our eyes.(11 votes)
- what are all the galaxies made up of?(4 votes)
- mostly gasses, dust, and semi random elements (ex: Iron,copperet cetra)(4 votes)
Video transcript
In the last video, I hinted that
things were about to get wacky. And they are. So if we start where we
left off in the last video, we started right over here,
looking at the distance to the nearest star. And just as a reminder,
in this drawing right here, this
depiction right here, this circle right here,
this solar system circle, it's not the size of the Sun. It's not the size of the
orbits of the Earth, or Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt. This is close to the
size of the Oort Cloud. And the actual orbit of
Earth is about-- well, the diameter of the orbit
of Earth is about 1/50,000 of this. So you wouldn't
even see it on this. It would not even make
up a pixel on this screen right here, much
less the actual size of the Sun or
something much smaller. And just remember that
orbit of the Earth, that was at a huge distance. It takes eight minutes for
light to get from the Sun to the Earth, this
super long distance. If you shot a bullet
at the Sun from Earth, it would take you that 17 years
to actually get to the Sun. So one thing, this huge
distance wouldn't even show up on this picture. Now, what we saw
in the last video is that if you travel at
unimaginably fast speeds, if you travel at 60,000
kilometers per hour-- and I picked that
speed because that's how fast Voyager 1
actually is traveling. That's I think
the fastest object we have out there
in space right here. And it's actually kind of
leaving the solar system as we speak. But even if you were
able to get that fast, it would still take 80,000
years, 75,000 or 80,000 years, to travel the 4.2 light
years to the Alpha Centauri cluster of stars. To the nearest star, it
would take 80,000 years. And that scale of time is
already an amount of time that I have trouble
comprehending. As you can imagine, all
of modern civilization has occurred, well, definitely
in the last 10,000 years. But most of recorded history
is in the last 4,000 or 5,000 years. So this is 80,000 years to
travel to the nearest star. So it's a huge distance. Another way to think about
it is if the Sun were the size of a basketball and you
put that basketball in London, if you wanted to do it in scale,
the next closest star, which is actually a
smaller basketball, right over here, Proxima
Centauri, that smaller basketball you would have
to put in Kiev, Ukraine in order to have
a similar scale. So these are basketballs
sitting in these cities. And you would have to
travel about 1,200 miles to place the next basketball. And these basketballs
are representing these super huge things that
we saw in the first video. The Sun, if you actually
made the Earth relative to these basketballs, these
would be little grains of sand. So there are any little
small planets over here, they would have to
be grains of sand in Kiev, Ukraine versus the
grain of sand in London. So this is a massive,
massive distance, already, at least in
my mind, unimaginable. And when it gets
really wacky is when you start really
looking at this. Even this is a super,
super small distance relative to the galactic scale. So this whole depiction of kind
of our neighborhood of stars, this thing over here is
about, give or take-- and we're doing rough
estimates right here-- it's about 30 light years. I'll just do LY for short. So that's about 30 light years, And once again, you can
take pictures of our galaxy from our point of view. But you actually can't take
a picture of the whole galaxy from above it. So these are going to
be artists' depictions. But if this is 30 light years,
this drawing right here of kind of our local neighborhood
of the galaxy, this right here is roughly-- and
these are all approximations. Let me do this in
a darker color. This is about 1,000 light years. And this is the
1,000 light years of our Sun's neighborhood,
if you can even call it a neighborhood anymore. Even this isn't really a
neighborhood if it takes you 80,000 years to get to
your nearest neighbor. But this whole
drawing over here-- now, it would take forever
to get anywhere over here-- it would be 1/30 of this. So it would be about that
big, this whole drawing. And what's really
going to blow your mind is this would be roughly
a little bit more than a pixel on this
drawing right here, that spans a 1,000 light years. But then when you
start to really put it into
perspective-- so now, let's zoom out a little bit--
so this drawing right here, this 1,000 light years is
now this 1,000 light years over here. So this is the local
vicinity of the Sun. And once again,
the word "local" is used in a very liberal
way at this point. So this right here
is 1,000 light years. If you're sitting
here and you're looking at an object
that's sitting-- let me do this in
a darker color-- if we're sitting here on Earth
and we're looking at an object out here that's 500
light years away, we're looking at it as it was
500 years ago because the light that is reaching our
eyeballs right now, or our telescopes
right now, left this guy over here
500 years ago. In fact, he's not going
to even be there anymore. He probably has moved
around a little bit. So just even on
this scale, we're talking about these
unimaginably huge distances. And then when we
zoom out, this is kind of our local part of
the galaxy right over here. This piece right here, this
is called the Orion Spur. And people are still
trying to work out exactly the details
of the actual shape the Milky Way Galaxy,
the galaxy that we're in. But we're pretty
sure-- actually, we're very sure-- we
have these spiral arms and we have these
spurs off of them. But it's actually very hard to
come up with the actual shape, especially because you can't
see a lot of the galaxy, because it's kind of
on the other side, on the other side of the center. But really just to get
a sense of something that at least-- I mean it blows
my mind if you really think about what it's saying--
these unbelievable distances show up as a little dot here. This whole drawing
shows up as a dot here. Now when we zoom out,
over here that dot would no longer even show up. It wouldn't even
register a pixel on this drawing right over here. And then this whole drawing,
this whole thing right over here, this whole picture
is this grid right over here. It is this right over here. So hopefully, that gives you
a sense of how small even our local neighborhood
is relative to the galaxy as a whole. And the galaxy as a whole,
just to give you a sense, has 200 to 400 billion stars. Or maybe I should say
solar systems just to give you a sense that
when we saw the solar system, it's not just the Sun. There's all this
neat, dynamic stuff. And there are planets, and
asteroids, and solar winds. And so there's 200
to 400 billion stars and for the most part, 200
and 400 billion solar systems. So it's an unimaginably, I
guess, complex or huge place. And just to make
it clear, even when we zoom in to this
picture right here, and I think it was obvious
based on telling you about this, that these little white
pockets right here, this isn't one star. This isn't two stars. These are thousands
of stars here. So when you go over here,
each little blotch of white that you see, that's not a star,
that's not a thousand stars. We're starting to talk
in the millions of stars when you look at certain
blotches here and there. I mean, maybe it might be
one star that's closer to you or might be a million
stars that are far apart and that are just
relatively close together. And everything has to be used
in kind of loose terms here. And we'll talk more
about other galaxies. But even this isn't the
upper bound of galaxies. People believe the
Andromeda Galaxy has a trillion stars in it,
a trillion solar systems. We're talking about these
huge, huge, immense distances. And so just to give you a sense
of where we fit in the picture, this is a rough
location of our Sun. And remember, that little
dot I drew just now is including millions of stars,
millions of solar systems, already unimaginable
the distances. But if you really want
to get at the sense relative to the whole galaxy,
this is an artist's depiction. Once again, we could
never obviously get this perspective on the galaxy. It would take us
forever to travel this far so that you could see
the galaxy from above. But this is our
best guess looking at things from
our vantage point. And we actually can't even
see this whole area over here because it's on the other side
of the center of the galaxy, which is super, super
dense and super bright. And so it's very hard to see
things on the other side. We think-- or actually there's
a super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. And we think that they're at the
center of all or most galaxies. But you know the whole point
of this video, actually this whole series of videos,
this is just kind of-- I don't know-- to put you in awe
a little bit of just how huge this is. Because when you really
think about the scale-- I don't know-- no words
can really describe it. But just to give
you a sense, we're about 25,000 light years from
the center of the galaxy. So even when we look at things
in the center of the galaxy, that's as they were
25,000 years ago. It took 25,000 years for
that light to get to us. I mean when that light left
the center of the galaxy, I won't even guess to
think what humanity was like at that point in time. So it's these huge distances
in the whole galaxy over here. And once again,
like solar systems, it's hard to say the edge of the
galaxy, because there's always going to be a few more stars
and other things orbiting around the galaxy as you
go further and further out, but it gets less
dense with stars. But the main density,
the main disk, is about 100,000 light years. 100,000 light years is
the diameter roughly of the main part of the galaxy. And it's about 1,000
light years thick. So you can kind of
imagine it as this disk, this thing that's fairly flat. But it's 1,000
light years thick. It's 1,000 light years thick. You would have to do this
distance 250 times just to go from the top part of
the galaxy to the bottom part, much less going
across the galaxy. So it might seem
relatively flat. But it's still immensely,
immensely thick. And just as another
way to visualize it, if this thing right over here
that includes the Oort Cloud, roughly a light year in
diameter, is a grain of sand, a millimeter in
diameter grain of sand, then the universe
as a whole is going to be the diameter
of a football field. And that might tell you, OK,
those are two tractable things. I can imagine a grain of sand,
a millimeter wide grain of sand in a football field. But remember, that
grain of sand is still 50,000 or 60,000 times the
diameter of Earth's orbit. And Earth's orbit,
it would still take a bullet or something
traveling as fast as a jet plane 15 hours to just go
half of that-- or sorry, not-- 15 years or 17 years,
I forgot the exact number. But it was 15, 16, 17
years to even cover half of that distance. So 30 years just to cover the
diameter of Earth's orbit. That's 1/60,000 of our little
grain of sand in the football field. And just to kind
of really, I don't know, have an appreciation
for how mind-blowing this really is, this is actually
a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy,
from our vantage point. As you can see,
we're in the galaxy and this is looking
towards the center. And even this picture, you start
to appreciate the complexity of what 100 billion stars are. But what I really
want to point out is even in this
picture, when you're looking at these things,
some of these things that look like stars,
those aren't stars. those are thousands of
stars or millions of stars. Maybe it could be
one star closer up. But when we're
starting to approach the center of the
galaxy, these are thousands and
thousands and millions of stars or solar systems that
we're actually looking at. So really, it starts
to boggle the mind to imagine what might actually
be going on over there.