Quote:Haven't read that. I'll have to check it out. There was a show on history ( I forgot the name of it) that tried to explain sizes and distances between things in space. For instance( and I'm making these numbers up to use to explain the show) they create a scale model of our solar system using a basketball as the sun and a marble for earth placed hundreds of feet away. But what really puts it in perspective is when they show the camera angle from the marble looking at the basketball and vis versa. I don't explain things well, but I hope that made sense. I'll keep an eye on the guide to see if I can find that show again and try to give you guys a heads up or at least give you the name of the show. It wasn't one of their normal shows, I don't think.

 

The Oort cloud, which consists of trillions of chunks of ice and rock (and also happens to be where ISON originated), forms a kind of globe around the last vestiges of the Sun's gravitational influence.  To give an idea of scale, the Earth resides on average around 93,000,000 miles from the Sun, or what is referred to as an Astronomical Unit.  If we were to place an object at the center of a table and another object about a half inch away to represent an AU, the Oort cloud would be 50,000 AUs away, or a sphere of about 3/10 of a mile in diameter surrounding that table.  That's almost two light years, or over 10 trillion miles.  That is just our sun.  Our Milky Way galaxy consists of hundreds of billions of suns and measures over 100,000 light years in width.

 

Now, with the size of our one single galaxy in mind, watch this:

 

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/impor...-by-hubble

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