In layman’s terms, the universe is so big that our brains aren’t really built to grasp it. A few comparisons help:

Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second. In one second, light could go around the Earth about 7½ times. Light from the Moon takes about 1.3 seconds to reach us. Light from the Sun takes about 8 minutes.

Now scale up:

The nearest star beyond the Sun is about 4.2 light-years away. That means its light takes 4.2 years to reach us. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light-years across. The observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across.

Earth the size of a pea

Imagine shrinking the Earth to the size of a pea. On that scale, the Sun would be a beach ball several dozen metres away, and the nearest star would be thousands of kilometres away.

The gaps between things in space are far larger than the things themselves.

Perhaps the most astonishing fact is this: there are thought to be hundreds of billions, possibly trillions, of galaxies, and each galaxy contains billions of stars. Many of those stars have planets.

So, a simple way to think about it is:

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If every grain of sand on all the beaches on Earth represented a star, there would still be roughly that many stars in the observable universe.

Big Bang

And the biggest mystery of all is that the observable universe may not be the entire universe. We can only see as far as light has had time to travel since the Big Bang.

Beyond that horizon, the universe could be vastly larger, perhaps even infinite. It’s one of the few subjects where mind-bogglingly huge is actually an understatement.

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