Universal Scale

Hey there scientists,

Just wanted to remind of of the scale of the universe. Wherever you are, right now, hold out your arm and stretch out your pointer finger. Look at how much space your fingernail takes up. The picture on your right was taken by the hubble telescope. It is a picture of what looks like to us to be a black patch of nothing in the night sky. The telescope looked into the deepest reaches of the known universe, and it came up with this picture. In that little patch of black nothingness in the sky we found THOUSANDS of galaxies. Remember, a galaxy is a collection of Billions, sometimes Trillions of stars. Each and EVERY smudge, spot, speck, and dot of light in this picture is an ENTIRE GALAXY. And that is in an empty patch of sky. We are one planet around one star in one small part of one medium-sized galaxy. Imagine the whole universe! The odds of us being the only living things? I'll let you infer about that one.

This picture is of objects 79 billion light years away. A light year is a distance- about 9 trillion meters- that light travels in a year. Light takes 8 minutes just to reach us from the sun. The size of universe is really unfathomable.