Content tagged "scale of the cosmos".
3 items (3 articles, 0 stories)
The solar system is racing through the Milky Way at 720,000 km/h, and a single orbit takes 230 million years. Since the dinosaurs died out, the Sun still hasn't completed even a third of a lap.
The night sky looks packed with stars. But shrink the Sun to a ping-pong ball (4 cm across), and Earth becomes a grain of sand 4.3 meters away, while the nearest star is another ping-pong ball roughly 1,100 km off. Set it down in Tokyo, and that star lands south of Kagoshima. In between: almost total vacuum. With over 100 billion stars in our galaxy, the universe is mostly made of the gaps between them.
The quasar J0313-1806 shows us the universe as it looked barely 670 million years after the Big Bang. At its center already sat a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times the Sun's mass. How did it grow so fast in such a young universe? SORABUMI traces the trick behind 'looking far means looking back in time.'