What If The Sun Were A Ping Pong Ball?
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, English humourist & science fiction novelist (1952 - 2001).
Since astronomical distances are so large and so far outside of the scope of human comprehension it is a standard trick to shrink astronomical objects down to the size of a familiar object and then provide scale comparisons with respect to that smaller object.
A table of astronomical data is provided at the bottom of the post and is a compilation of the distances I have used in this post for those who are interested.
A Ping Pong Ball Sun
Okay, so in this post let's imagine that the Sun is the size of a ping pong ball which is 40 mm in diameter.
The Earth's orbit which has a radius of 150,000,000 km would then be about 8.6 metres from the Sun, this is now the distance of 1 astronomical unit or AU. The Earth itself would be a mere 0.4 mm in diameter.
The outermost planet, Uranus which is 19 AU away in reality would be about 164 metres away from us in this new scale. The edge of our solar system called the heliosphere is 90 AU away from the Sun. In the new ping pong scale this means it would be 775 metres away from us.
1 light year (LY) which is the distance that light travels in a year is about 63,241 AU and in the pong pong scale it would be 545 km long. Driving at 100 kph in your car would take 5.5 hours to go one LY and is now the equivalent of the speed of the starship Enterprise (probably the NCC 1701A).
Alpha Centauri is 4.3 LY away from us. In the new scaled down universe this translates to about 2,400 km. That's about the distance from London UK to Moscow Russia.
The Milky Way is at least 100,000 LY in diameter, in the scaled down universe this translates to about 55 million kilometres. That would be more than 200 times the Earth-Moon distance.
So imagine that, if the Sun were the size of a ping pong ball the diameter of the collection of stars known as the Milky Way would be more than 200 times the Earth-Moon distance.
Andromeda Galaxy which is a well known and beautiful spiral galaxy is about 2.5 million LY away. In the scaled down universe this translates to 1.4 billion kilometres. That is the roughly the distance to Saturn.
So if the Sun were the size of a ping pong ball the size of our galaxy would be 200 times the Earth-Moon distance and Andromeda would be a similar object at the distance of Saturn.
Space is indeed an empty place.
One last distance marker which is the size of the Observable Universe itself which is believed to be 93 billion light years in diameter. This distance translates to 5.4 light years in the scaled down universe.
So even if we shrink down the Sun to a small size like a ping pong ball the observable universe will still be light years in size and still outside the scope of the human mind.
The Sun Is A Grain of Sand
A coarse grain of sand is estimated to be about 1 millimetre in diameter (more or less). If we shrunk the Sun down to the size of a grain of sand then Alpha Centauri would 60 km away. The Milky Way Galaxy would be 1,400,000 km in diameter which is about 5 times the Earth-Moon distance.
At this scale the Andromeda Galaxy is 34 million km away (about 130 times the Earth-Moon distance) and the Observable Universe is 1.3 trillion kilometres in size.
This is all still too large to really comprehend so ...
The Sun Is A Bacterium
Some bacteria are about 1 micron in size. If we shrunk the Sun down this size then the Observable Universe would still be 1.3 billion km in size. This is about 5000 times the Earth-Moon distance or about 5 times the Sun-to-Mars distance.
So we have to shrink our local star down to the size of a bacterium just to get the size of the Observable Universe down to something that a human has a chance of comprehending.
Closing Words
We humans live our lives at the metre scale and we can comprehend things from millimetre size scale up to maybe a few thousand kilometres (a day's drive). You can drive from Toronto Canada to Florida USA a distance of about 2,000 km in one go in about 24 hours (don't ask me how I know this).
If the Sun were shrunk down to the size of a bacterium the Observable Universe, at 93 billion light years in reality, would still be about 5 times the size of Mars' distance from the Sun. It would take about 2000 years to drive that distance. This distance might be understandable by a human but that is probably a stretch.
It is said that there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on the Earth's beaches. I now see how that could be possible.
Thank you for reading my post.
Astronomical Data Table
| Object | Dimensions |
|---|---|
| Ping pong ball | Diameter = 40 mm (4.0 cm, 0.04 m) |
| Sun | Diameter = 1,392,000 km |
| Earth | Diameter = 12,742 km |
| Earth's orbit | Radius= 150,000,000 km (= 1AU) |
| Neptune's orbit | Radius = 19 AU |
| Heliosphere | Radius = ~90 AU |
| Alpha Centauri | Distance = 4.4 light years |
| Milky Way Galaxy | Diameter = ~100,000 light years |
| Andromeda Galaxy | Distance = 2.5 million light years |
| Observable Universe | Diameter = 93 billion light years |
| Light Year | Distance = 9.5 trillion kilometres (63,241 AU) |
| Sand grain (coarse) | Diameter = 1 mm (0.001 m) |
| Bacteria | Diameter = 1 micron (0.000001 m) |
Post Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_tennis#Ball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_size
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria
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If the Sun were shrunk down to the size of a proton then the size of the Observable Universe would be about 1.1 km if I did not screw up my math.
We are pretty frickin small.
Congratulations on reaching a reputation of 50 BTW.
Do you believe in the matter anti-matter thing? (if a missed article, link to it pls.)
Yes. Anti-matter is a thing but it is really is not as mysterious as science fiction makes it out to be.
It has been known to exist since at least 1932:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter
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A writer, not a physicist, if an edge doesn't form an angle with another one, it'd be an inconvenient destination for me either way :). Two possible scenarios (?):
∜mp
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It was not an explanation, and I did understand it was about the size. It was an exploration in a possible scenario. "Hardonning" does not exist yet as such. After I spend some time maturing the idea how to build on this a story, it will. :D ∜mp
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It's not a language problem at all. It's a contextual, and it's not mine in this case. Now you have picked my curiosity. Would you understand the meaning if it was in Bulgarian? ∜mp
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It is really hard to imagine how huge Space actually is.
Videos like this one can help put things in perspective.
I always love these types of videos. This one is pretty good.
Perhaps, "they" had some tea on the spaceship, and bacterias are exactly "this" so that we don't need to shrink celestial objects in order to understand "things." As per the "We humans live our lives at the metre scale," "Pardon me for breathing," we live our lives at the breathing scale :)... ∜mp
Hah, our Universe is just a flake of tea in someone's tea cup.
The universe is so big that it could be populated by trillions of conscious species with space travel technology and all wondering if they are alone.
What if we were dealing with a "repetitor of distances" and do not need technology at all to travel? What if all physical and mathematical laws were build on a false foundation? What if the detection of Life was not dependable on distances but on Levels of Access?... ∜mp
You would need some serious scientific evidence to challenge our foundation of physical and mathematical laws... 😀
Science has never been about certainty, and this very article speaks ab human capacity to believe in something "per se" having to deal with our "length of perceptions." ONLY when we have contradictory/questionable values "to retain attention," we can invest ourselves to try measure and quantify those. Then, most physics we study is only applicable in particular conditions, so, I don't need to prove anything. Time will do it w/ some help. Like Asimov says in his essay Relativity of Wrong, " ... superseded theories are not so much wrong as incomplete." ∜mp