We’re often amazed by the size of natural features and manmade buildings or objects that we see here on Earth, such as the immensity of the Grand Canyon or the lofty heights of the Empire State Building. But think about our own backyard, such as the distances between planets in the Solar System light-years between stars, and we reach a point where it’s seemingly impossible to wrap our heads around sizes of that magnitude.
A few months back, we wrote on an interactive graphic that helps put different-sized objects into perspective, from the miniscule size of a neutrino, an elementary subatomic particle, to the enormous diameter of VY Canis Majoris, the largest known star. Joel Primack, one of the world’s foremost cosmologists and physicists, uses a similar model in a journal through the Milky Way.
Speaking at the Science and Nonduality Conference, Primack demonstrates the size of our local galaxy and puts into perspective our place within it.
Primack: Taking a Journey Through the Milky Way Galaxy from Science and Nonduality on FORA.tv
