Today we are fairly confident that the Milky Way is probably between 100,000 and 150,000 light years across. But the size of the universe depends on a number of things, including its shape and expansion. The diameter of the observable universe is estimated at about 28 billion parsecs (93 billion light-years). size-of-the-universe Space, as Douglas Adams once so aptly wrote, is big. Updated November 9, 2018 60.8k views12 items. If you know your browser is up to date, you should check to ensure that The age of the universe is about 13.75 billion years. Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STSCI/NASA); US Mint, Image to right: The picture on the right was taken three weeks after the one on the left. It seems like complete overkill for God to have created so many galaxies when one would have been more than enough. Scale of the Universe English (US) English (British) 中文 (简体) 中文 Español العربية Português Deustsch Français 한국어 Türkçe Polski فارسی Українська Româna Nederlands Svenska עברית Esperanto Eesti Email Us The interactive opens with a variety of objects shown on the screen, from a Giant Earthworm to a hummingbird. Our star, the Sun, is a slightly above average sized star (one of the 1021 stars in the universe) in an average sized galaxy (of which there are ~100 billion in the universe). Can you spot the supernova in the picture at right? From the time of the ancient Greeks and even in recent years, new discoveries have forced us to think bigger about just how vast and distant the Universe is. According to NASA, scientists know that the universe is flat with only about a 0.4 percent margin of error (as of 2013). But we have no reason to think that the universe is only as big as is visible to us. But that doesn't stop her and other scientists from continuing to … Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team, Follow this link to skip to the main content. Or, you could go the other way and use the resource to help give students a feel for the size of the universe. The large size of the universe tells us about His power and authority, and is required for the formation of rocky planets. As a reminder, a light-year is a unit of length equal to just under 10 trillion kilometres (or about 6 trillion miles). It could be much bigger than that. And that could change our understanding of just how big the universe is. Some of these figures are listed below, with brief descriptions of possible reasons for misconceptions about them. How far away is the nearest star to our sun? The Hubble ultra deep field image below shows what the universe looked like ~2 billion years a… [VIDEO: Oldest Light in the Universe: How it Traveled to Us]. The Scale of the Universe takes you on a ride down to the smallest thing theorized by scientists and then out to the vastness of the universe. Inch. Because of the connection between distance and the speed of light, this means scientists can look at a region of space that lies 13.8 billion light-years away. This is known as a Type 1A supernova. The Universe has not always been the same size. Spiral galaxy NGC 4603 containing Cepheids being used for distance measurements. The truth is, scientists can't put a number on it. If the universe expanded at the speed of light during inflation, it should be 10^23, or 100 sextillion. However, like that same ship in the ocean, we cannot tell where we lie in the enormous span of the universe. Van den Bergh offered evidence supporting a high value of the Hubble constant (about 80 kilometers per second per megaparsec), suggesting a young age and therefore small size of the universe. 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