Content tagged "scale".
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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.
On a faucet, red means hot water and blue means cold. In the night sky, it's the reverse: red stars sit at a relatively cool 3,000°C, while blue-white stars blaze past 30,000°C. The Sun, a yellow star, lands right in between at about 5,500°C. Star color isn't a matter of style — it's a direct readout of surface temperature, one you can see with your own eyes in Orion's red Betelgeuse and blue Rigel.
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.