1. What is your Cosmic Address?
# Street
City
State
Country
Continent
Hemisphere
Planet
System
Galaxy …

2. Estimate the size of the astronomical objects below assuming the Earth is the size of a grain of sand. Imagine objects like golf balls, watermelons, the PE track, Roseville, the USA, or even the Earth itself for your comparisons.
Realm
Estimates
Group 6
Group 10
Group 3
Group 9
Group 8
Earth
Sand grain
Sun
Solar System
Solar Neighborhood
Galaxy
Local Group
Local Supercluster
Universe

3. Realm Actual Size Multiple Scale Model
(km)
(light-years)
Multiple
“X” larger than Earth
Scale Model
Earth
12,700 (1.27E+4)
1.4 billionths (1.4E-9) 1
salt grain (0.1 mm)
Sun
1.39 million (1.39E+6)
1.5 ten-millionths (1.5E-7)
109 (1.09E+2)
gum ball (1.9 cm)
Solar System
30 billion (3.0E+10)
(3.2E-3)
2.34 million (2.34E+6)
football stadium (234 meters)
Solar Neighborhood
617 trillion (6.17E+14)
65 (6.5E+1)
48 billion (4.8E+10)
Mercury (4,800 km)
Galaxy
1.5 quintillion (1.5E+18)
160,000 (1.6E+5)
120 trillion (1.2E+14)
8.6 x Sun (12 million km)
Local Group
31 quintillion (3.1E+19)
6.5 million (6.5E+6)
2.4 quadrillion (2.4E+15)
Orbit of Mars (1.6 AU)
Local Supercluster
1.2 sextillion (1.2E+21)
130 million (1.3E+8)
97 quadrillion (9.7E+16)
Orbit of Eris (68 AU)
Universe
1.5 septillion (1.5E+24)
156 billion (1.56E+11)
116 quintillion (1.16E+20)
Oort Cloud (1.3 light-years)

4. Realms of the Universe
Image courtesy of The Cosmic Perspective by Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, & Voit; Addison Wesley, 2002

5. Earth Planet where we all live Comprised primarily of rock
Spherical in shape
12,700 km in diameter
It would take 17 days to circumnavigate the globe driving a car at 100 km/hr
At the speed of light, it would take 0.13 seconds to go all the way around Earth.

6. Sun Star that Earth orbits
Composed primarily of hydrogen and helium gas
Uses nuclear fusion in its core to generate heat and light to allow itself to resist the crushing weight of its own mass
Spherical in shape
1.39 Million km in diameter

7. Earth & Sun The Sun’s diameter is 109 times greater than that of Earth
Over 1 million Earths would fit inside the Sun’s volume
Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 150 million kilometers. This distance is called an Astronomical Unit (AU)
It would take 11,780 Earths lined up side to side to bridge the 1 AU between Earth and Sun.

8. The Solar System
8 planets, thousands and thousands of dwarf planets and asteroids, trillions of comets and meteoroids
Mostly distributed in a disk about the Sun
Sun blows a constant wind of charged gas into interplanetary space, called the Solar Wind
Boundary between Solar Wind and interstellar space at 100 AU from the Sun (200 AU diameter)

9. The Solar Neighborhood
The region of the Galaxy within about 32.6 light-years of the Sun (65 light-years diameter) is considered its neighborhood.
Here stars move generally with the Sun in its orbit around the center of the Galaxy
This region is inside a large bubble of hot interstellar gas called the Local Bubble. Here the gas temperature is about 1 million degrees Kelvin and the density is 1000 times less than average interstellar space.
To Center of Galaxy
The image is 390 light-years across.
Direction of Galactic Rotation

10. The Milky Way Galaxy
The Milky Way Galaxy is a giant disk of stars 160,000 light-years across and 1,000 light-years thick.
The Sun is located at the edge of a spiral arm, 30,000 light-years from the center
It takes 250 Million years for the Sun to complete one orbit
There are over 100 Billion stars in the Milky Way
The Spiral arms are only 5% more dense than average, and are the locations of new star formation

11. The Local Group
Contains 3 large spiral galaxies--Milky Way, Andromeda (M31), and Triangulum (M33)—plus a few dozen dwarf galaxies with elliptical or irregular shapes.
Gravitationally bound together—orbiting about a common center of mass
Ellipsoidal in shape
About 6.5 million light-years in diameter

12. The Local Supercluster
A cluster of many groups and clusters of galaxies
Largest cluster is the Virgo cluster containing over a thousand galaxies.
Clusters and groups of galaxies are gravitationally bound together, however the clusters and groups spread away from each other as the Universe expands.
The Local Supercluster gets bigger with time
It has a flattened shape
The Local Group is on the edge of the majority of galaxies
The Local Supercluster is about 130 Million light-years across
The Local Supercluster

13. The Universe
Surveys of galaxies reveal a web-like or honeycomb structure to the Universe
Great walls and filaments of matter surrounding voids containing no galaxies
Probably 100 Billion galaxies in the Universe
The plane of the Milky Way Galaxy obscures our view of what lies beyond. This creates the wedge-shaped gaps in all-sky galaxy surveys such as those shown here.

14. The observable Universe is 156 Billion light-years in diameter.
The Universe
The observable Universe is 156 Billion light-years in diameter.
Computer Simulation